Giant Pool of Water Ice at Mars' South Pole

BoingBoing pal John Parres writes,

Mars "has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out."

I don't know about you but it certainly makes me wonder what things, if any, have grown and evolved within over the billions of years of warming melting /cooling freezing.

Link to Space.com article, and Link to a larger version of the image above:

This radar map shows the thickness of the south polar layered deposits of Mars (purple represents the thinnest areas and red the thickest). The dark circle is the area poleward of 87 degrees south latitude, where MARSIS can’t collect radar data. Credit: NASA/JPL/ASI/ESA/University of Rome/MOLA Science Team/USGS