Lynn Carter

So they're looking into some of these areas and trying to see if there's regions within those areas that would be even better to go than others.

So it's kind of changed how people think about where they would want to go on Mars, especially if you were going to be someplace for a long time.

I think the idea for the mining of the ice in these places would be that you scrape off the surface and then try and sublimate the ice off and then catch it with some sort of thing.

Another idea that NASA's thought of is maybe you could just dispense with the ice entirely and go someplace where you have clay minerals or hydrated minerals where you might have water trapped inside the crystal matrix and then try and liberate it that way.

And there's people at Johnson Space Center working on that, but really it seems like the easiest thing to do is just go someplace where you know that there's water that you can just

get to right away.

So these are a couple of the examples of mid-latitude ice that we've found.

And then what I've been working on is actually volcanoes.

Ice is great, but what I'm really interested in is volcanism.

And one of the reasons I'm interested in it is because we now know that on the Earth, volcanism was a major component of mass extinctions on the Earth.

So you have these places like the Columbia flood basalts in the US, where you had enormous amounts of volcanism.

that probably affected our climate.

And there's also the Deccan Traps in India, and there's these big volcanic deposits in Siberia.

And the ones in Siberia, people think we're responsible for one of the mass extinctions on Earth because you have so much volcanism going on.

It actually changed our climate.

And one of the questions for Mars, because we know there's many volcanoes on Mars, there's many big volcanoes on Mars, and volcanoes could have been active like a billion years ago.

So the question was, could those volcanoes have produced periods that were common enough that life could have retaken a foothold or possibly taken a foothold?

And what were the effects of volcanism on habitability on Mars?

And even in general, what are the implications of having a lot of active volcanism to habitability of worlds?

So what I've been doing is mostly focusing on volcanoes.