why is earth the only planet in the solar system with a significant amount of ice on it?

Answer 1

There are many planets and moons with significant amounts of frozen water (Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, Titan, Triton, Pluto to name just a few). There are also many worlds with water vapor (Mars again, all the gas giants).

The problem is *liquid* water. Liquid water is very delicate, requiring very specific circumstances to exist. Liquid water cannot exist on Mars, for example, due to the low atmospheric pressure -- it is either vapor or ice. Mars' atmosphere may have been thicker in the past, however, and there may have even been oceans!

As it stands now, though, Earth is the only planet *confirmed* to have liquid water. There may be liquid water, however, in some of the moons of the outer solar system, like the aforementioned Europa, Enceladus, and Triton.

Hope that helps clear things up.

JIM

PS: Is it so hard to be nice, people? Yeesh.

Answer 2

Becasue otehr planets are either too close to the sun (therefore too hot) for ice to exist, while other planets have other excuses. Mars is too small to have enough gravity to have retained enough of an atmosphere to prevent the ice from evaporating into space; while Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune do not have the right composition to have lots of water in the first place (and no real surface to speak of)

On the other hand, some moons of Juputer are believed to be mostly ice, and Pluto is also thought to be some sort of large comet nucleus, with a high % of ice as its composition.

Answer 3

Could have? Definitely possible. Some people believe in an exogenesis - where life on earth actually began in space, and primitive DNA fell to the planet on an asteroid. So the life form might have begun on another planet. I don't think it's possible that life evolved, twice, separately, so close by - it's too unlikely. But if they were related, it's possible. But there's not yet any proof. They're looking for liquid water on Jupiter's and Saturn's moons, and if they find any then life could spawn. It's still in the pipeline.

Answer 4

Because: 1. Venus is too hot, and ice won't form. 2. Mars may have had significant amounts of water, but it probably evaporated into space because Mars is only 1/3rd the size of the Earth. (Which, incidently, also eliminated the Martian Carbon cycle) 3. The outer planets could have plenty of ice, but at those low temperatures, they also have plenty of ice made out of methane. 4. Most comets are made of ice, which is how this planet got its water in the first place, by cometary collisions.

Answer 5

Mars and Pluto both have "significant" amounts of surface ice. Also, many solar system moons have extensive fields of ice, like Europa which is almost completely covered in ice.

Answer 6

Earth is not the only body with water ice on it. Mercury, Mars, Moon, Europa (Jupiter's moon), and a host of other solar system bodies have or are expected to have water ice on them. Europa, for example, appears to have more water than the Earth does. The entire moon is covered with a thick sheet of ice it appears. There is no telling how thick that ice sheet is.

Answer 7

As far as I know, it's not! Think Neptune and Pluto. I heard that one of the outer planets in our solar system is made up of a lot of ice.

Answer 8

Go to Nasa's website--or even take some courses in astronomy you will find out that on Mars it has polor caps and Pluto is the farthest of the 9 planets must have ice!!

Answer 9

Well, its not. The Solar System is basically disk shaped. In Einstein's mathematical view it can be thought of as a frictionless plane with indentations at the locations of objects with mass. The larger the mass, the larger the indentation. The whole thing is moving through space together and the objects are in orbits of the Sun and each other. An orbit is a balance point between the inertia or forward motion of an object and the gravitic moment, or average 'down' of all the mass in the universe. The Sun is the master of this locality in space. Its gravity field extends outward to infinity. But the gravitic moment which bows to the Sun ends way out in space beyond pluto. At that distance, 'down' swings away and points toward the center of the Milky Way. This 'down' has the Sun and its system in its grasp. The Solar system itself is in orbit around the Milky Way's center of mass.

so what does this have to do with water on the Solar System's (SS) planets? As the SS moves through space its gravity well captures dust and ice from the void of space. Most of this take up an orbit way out beyond pluto. But some of it enters the inner SS. This ice and dust has accreted over billions of years into more or less - usually less - solid balls of ice and dust with no real core. Like 3D snowflakes, they drift in space. When the gravitic moment in their location shifts to point down at the SS, they begin to move toward the SS. What happens to them depends on where they are relative to the SS and how big they are. The first 'dimples' in the gravitic moment that they react to are the outer giants of the SS: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with Jupiter being the biggest.

These icy balls fall into the SS following the pull of gravity. Like a constant fall of snow, they are gathered up by all the planets and the Sun. What happens then depends on the mass and temperature of what ever they hit, and the mass of the ice ball.

We saw one of them, which was quite large, impact on Jupiter in 1994. On July 16 to 22 of that year, over twenty fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the planet Jupiter. [1]

If in our lifetimes we can see comets impact a planet, then over the life of the Solar System, there has been enough impacts and captures to provide water and dust to every member of the solar System. What happens to it is just Physics.

Depending on the impact, the icy ball could blast a crater, sink into the gaseous depths, fall as dusty rain, or become trapped in orbit around the planet. Probably there is a complicated formula to determine how much dusty ice has fallen on each planet depending on its mass and orbital position. Another formula could determine what happened to the water. It could freeze, or evaporate back into space, or become a liquid and react chemically with the material of the planet depending on local environments.

Suffice it to say that all the planets in the Solar System have received their share - whatever that means gravitationally - of dusty ice. What they did with it, depends on what they are. We now have pictures of all the planets and many of the larger moons. If there is a constant surface, rather than a gaseous or liquid one, we can see countless craters. [2]

;-D Everything in the Solar System - including the Sun - came from the icy dust of outer space. If you have a gold cap in a tooth, that gold originally came from the nova of a star which blasted the heavier elements into space. So did the Calcium in your bones. We are truly made of stardust!

Answer 10

Not true. An example is Mars. It has so much ice that if it melted, the whole planet would be covered with water.