Frozen beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars lies about as much water as what’s in Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes, a team of scientists led by The University of Texas at Austin has determined using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They found about as much frozen water as the volume of Lake Superior.

Scientists examined part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter’s ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes revealed a deposit more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 260 feet to about 560 feet, with a composition that’s 50 to 85 percent water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles. Read more

Earth seems drenched with water from mountaintop to ocean bottom.

But our home planet is a desert compared to some places the solar system, both in terms of its total water volume and the amount of liquid on Earth relative to its size.

Consider Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa, which is smaller than Earth’s moon. Scientists recently used 20-year-old Voyager data to find even more evidence that Europa has twice as much water as our planet. Read more

Water is one of the most fundamental molecules on Earth, and yet scientists are only just beginning to wrap their heads around how bizarre the substance really is.

Case in point: researchers have now discovered that water exists in not one, but two distinct liquid phases, each with big differences in structure and density.

Using X-rays to study H2O in unprecedented detail, physicists from Stockholm University in Sweden have provided evidence that the liquid water we know and love isn’t just a single phase, it is in fact a fluctuation between two forms – high and low density.

“The new results give very strong support to a picture where water at room temperature can’t decide in which of the two forms it should be, high or low density, which results in local fluctuations between the two” said one of the researchers, Lars G.M. Pettersson. Read more

Despite sounding like the most egregious contradiction in physics, hot water appears to freeze faster than cold water under certain circumstances. The phenomenon can be traced back to Aristotle himself, but after centuries of experiments demonstrating this phenomenon, no one’s been able to explain it.

Now physicists are pointing to strange properties of hydrogen bonds as the solution to one of the oldest mysteries in physics – but others are claiming the so-called Mpemba effect doesn’t even exist at all.

For a bit of background into the Mpemba effect, this phenomenon has been confounding physicists since Aristotle first noticed it more than 2,000 years ago. Read more

Within the past hundred years, water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of the human population. As water supplies continue to shrink, some parts of the world are facing a looming crisis.

As of 2019, 17 countries in total are now experiencing “extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, according to recent data from the World Resources Institute (WRI).

This, in essence, means that nearly one-quarter of the world’s population – around 1.7 billion people – currently lives in areas where agriculture, industries and cities withdraw 80 percent of their available water supply every year. Read more