Tag: ice

Life Imitates Art: The Mars Rovers of Iceland

On my next to last day in Iceland, I drove the Kaldidalur route from Reykholt to Thingvellir, passing en route the Langjokull ice cap. Much to my surprise, there was a modestly-marked turnoff that led not merely close to the ice but out onto it (just left of the prominent hill in the center of the image): 

Between Iceland and Norway, I’ve been up close to a dozen or so glaciers but have only ever seen ice caps from a distance. I always pictured them as being bounded by ridges or mountains where they didn’t squeeze out through passes as outlet glaciers, and didn’t anticipate that the margin of the ice would simply taper off to nothing. Just look at this – is this what you would have expected? That such a huge mass of ice would just kinda…end?

I took some pictures and made some notes and filed it all away for when we eventually send characters to the North Cap. Expect to encounter this scene with a red tint at some point.

Another surprise, and the point of this post, was the tour vehicles used by Into the Glacier to ferry people to a man-made ice cave further out on the ice cap.

A little research turned up that they were custom made from MAN 8×8 military chassis by a British company, Army-UK. The things were huge – the pictures don’t convey just how large they seemed up close (but note the Ford Explorer for some sense of scale). I couldn’t see how many seats there were in the front cab, but it looked wide enough to seat four abreast. Army-UK gives a maximum cabin capacity of 38 passengers, which would work out to ten two-by-two rows (minus two seats for the entrance door and steps).

This one was even larger than the one above:

While these aren’t exactly how we pictured the rovers in the Ares Project universe (at least not the rovers sent to Mars as part of the titular Ares Project, which we describe as having cylindrical bodies with a single large front transparency akin to the submersibles from The Abyss), they are great analogues against which one can imagine what other sorts of rovers might look like. In particular, the rovers used by the ill-fated British Trans-Marineris Expedition of 2050…oh, wait, we haven’t talked about that story yet, have we…

 

 

 

 

Fog on Mars

This report on a newly-released analysis of data from the Phoenix lander pretty closely describes what we had in mind for the “yardang” scene…only in reverse.

This report on a newly-released analysis of data from the Phoenix lander pretty closely describes what we had in mind for the “yardang” scene…only in reverse – Martian-Fog Study Finds Thick Haze, “Diamond Dust”:

“Heat from the air is lost to the ground, so the air close to the ground gets colder, and as that pocket of [cold] air gets larger,” more water vapor in the atmosphere condenses into ice crystals, and the fog gets thicker, Moores said.

“The fog starts closer to the ground and rises in height over time, so the cloud gets thicker and thicker and higher and higher as the night goes on,” he added.

Eventually the icy haze begins to shower the ground with a light sprinkling of snowlike particles. The shower is not quite snowfall, the scientists say, but is perhaps more akin to the “diamond dust” that falls from the skies on some cold nights in Earth’s Arctic regions.

Some 0.0001 inch (2.5 micrometers) of frost coats the Martian surface by the time the sun begins to rise in the morning. That icy layer then sublimates—turns directly from a solid to a gas.

In our case, the resulting frost at first sublimates into a fog as sunlight hits it, then rapidly dissipates. It may be a bit of literary license (or not — there’s no saying that what we described doesn’t happen), but it’s not far off from observed reality.