Mars isn’t quite the dry desert planet we’ve imagine. It’s cold, yes, but there’s more and more evidence of water still on the surface. A lot of it.

Like on Earth, the poles of Mars contain glaciers. But on Mars it doesn’t stop there—the planet also has ample ice buried in its mid-latitude regions. According to research to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, those glaciers hold up to 150 billion cubic meters of ice. Their measurements have also revealed that this is in fact water ice, rather than carbon dioxide ices (aka dry ice.) The observations come from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s data from a decade ago.

These glaciers have been hiding in plain sight this whole time, under a blanketing of dust. While we’ve known about them for years, this new research tells us something new about their depth, what they’re made of, and their sheer vastness. There’s so much ice, in fact, that if the glaciers were spread uniformly over the entire surface of the world, Mars would be covered in one meter of ice, the researchers say.

Mars’ dusty cover is doing more than hiding the glaciers from non-radar view. The researchers believe that the dust may have protected the glaciers from evaporation in the thin, radiation-prone atmosphere of Mars.

Source: Popular Mechanics