Fall 2025 LPL Evening Lecture Series
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
7:00p.m. (Arizona)
Studying Earth's Glaciers to Unlock Martian Mysteries
Dr. Jack Holt
Professor
Massive glaciers have been discovered on Mars and confirmed, using orbital radar, to be composed of water ice. Just one of these glaciers could cover the entire city of Tucson with a half-mile of ice. They could not have formed under today’s Martian conditions, but are preserved by a cover of rock and dust, so they must be relics of past climates. Many questions persist: How did they form? How did they get covered? Could they provide habitats for microbial life?
Here on Earth, a unique class of glaciers resembles these fossil Martian giants. They are equally enigmatic yet easier to access. While they are interesting due to their response to climate change, my team uses them as analogs for Mars, conducting fieldwork in remote parts of Alaska and the Wyoming Rockies. We have developed geophysical methods relevant to future Mars exploration, including an autonomous drone equipped with ground-penetrating radar to see beneath the ice. We also measure glacier motion from drones and aircraft to relate what we learn about their interiors to flow features on the surface.
Together, these studies provide new insights into how these unusual glaciers behave—on both Mars and Earth—with implications for the future human exploration of the Red Planet.
Lectures are free and open to the public.
Kuiper Space Sciences room 308 | 1629 E. University Blvd. | Tucson
or
Register for the Zoom webinar
For information about upcoming lectures and details about location and links to the Zoom webinars, visit the LPL Evening Lecture Series web site.
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Congratulations, Dr. Dani DellaGiustina!
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Dr. Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina has been honored as the 2026 Fred Kavli Plenary Lecturer by the American Astronomical Society. In selecting DellaGiustina, the AAS cited her role in "providing groundbreaking insights into the origins of the Earth and other solar system bodies" through the OSIRIS-REx team's work. She will deliver the lecture January 5, 2026 at the society's 247th meeting in Phoenix.
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