Manfred Dutch von Ehrenfried - From Cave Man to Cave Martian: Living in Caves on the Earth, Moon and Mars

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Hole in Mars. Art by Ron Miller, 2014.

We were at Lofthellir in Iceland. The entrance to the lava tube was a circular hole in the ground, approximately 20 meters across. It was in the middle of a young lava flow, with volcanoes in the distance but none immediately nearby. Using a ladder, we climbed down into the pit to its sandy floor. Below the mounds of windblown sand were large blocks of rock which had fallen when the roof of the lava tube collapsed and created the skylight that now served as its entrance.

Beneath the skylight, the lava tube extended in two directions. The darkness beyond the twilight zone in either direction looked ominous. As we made our way into the cave in its upstream direction, the passage quickly narrowed from 20 meters to about 1 meter. This lava tube was no subway tunnel. Instead, over its accessible length of 200 meters it would prove to be a 3D maze of crawl spaces, narrows, attics, cellars, ledges, ramps, and cavernous chambers.

But the challenge of squeezing through was amply rewarded. Soon after entering the darkness, the beams of our helmet lamps caught intensely bright reflections. We had encountered ice. Massive Ice! Not just veneers on the walls, and icicles dangling from the ceiling, or ice stalagmites rising from the floor, but entire underground mini-glaciers, with accumulation, ablation and melt zones, lateral moraines, and terminal aprons. This was the stuff of Jules Verne.

It is difficult to describe the awe, thrill, and wonder of caving, particularly inside lava tubes. But lava tubes filled with massive ice add an entirely new dimension to the whole experience. More importantly, had we been on the Moon or Mars, such ice would have been a holy grail. Finding massive ice in a cave could potentially mean having readily accessible water for hydration, fuel production (by breaking down H 2 O into hydrogen and oxygen), cleaning, diluting, irrigation, heat exchange, and more. In the case of Mars, finding ice might also mean the possibility of finding extant alien Life.

We know for certain today, thanks to remote-sensing imaging from orbital spacecraft, that there are caves on the Moon, and also on Mars. Many if not most of these caves are lava tubes formed in volcanic lava fields or in impact-melt lava sheets.