Water‐Ice Exposing Scarps Within the Northern Midlatitude Craters on Mars

Abstract

We report new exposures of water ice along the scarps wall located within craters in the northern midlatitude region of Mars using high-resolution imagery and spectral data of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The exposed water-ice deposits are shallower and exhibit 1.5 and 2 μm absorption. These scarps are located on the pole-facing walls and equator-facing wall origin floor deposits which formed over the latitude dependent mantle. Our observations advance in bracketing the younger ice deposits through the crater size-frequency distributions of host craters, which formed around ~25 and ~95 Myr and exposed around ~1 Myr. This reveals that ice transportation, accumulation, compaction, and ice-dust mixing occurred in recent epochs. Our study complements the earlier studies that shallow water ice is spatially widespread and consistent with subsurface water-ice detection by neutron spectrometer. We interpret the ice remnants likely to preserve in craters pole-facing wall and equator-facing wall-associated floor deposits, which demonstrates widespread water-ice resources on Mars.