Mercury Has Enough Ice To Bury Washington Under Two Miles

When Coleridge wrote "Water, water everywhere," he had no idea.

Scientists have confirmed the presence of vast stores of ice on red-hot Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. NASA's Messenger spacecraft orbiting the heat-scorched planet has detected as much as a trillion metric tons of the frozen liquid, enough to bury Washington, D.C. under two miles of ice.

How can water exist on the solar system's hottest planet, with surface temperatures that can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit? It's been stuck "where the sun don't shine," deep in polar craters in perpetual shadow where temperatures drop to -370.

Ground-based telescopes detected the water decades ago, but Messenger confirmed its chemical fingerprint as well as possible organic compounds that most likely arrived to Mercury via comets and asteroids. And though critters would have to be awfully tenacious to exist in this extreme environment, theories that the liquid of Life is ubiquitous have just heated up considerably.

[SEThatered]

They detected hidrogen in some bounded form, nobody said it is water...

[riderlibertas]

Well, now that it's been confirmed they should just go ahead and bury DC.

[nomced]

Mercury isn't the hottest planet in our solar system. That would be Venus...

[didy]

your really isolating the audience when you don't mention the temperature in Celsius. along with this and the adele video, it's starting to grind on me.

[jayjayrs]

CNN top story LIFE ON VEINS ? SOME SCIENTIST SAY MAYBE