Photo by yomaullman

Wanna know just how much ice there is on Mercury? Well, someone at NASA put in terms that we here in D.C. could very readily understand, reports the New York Times:

Mercury is as cold as ice.

Indeed, Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, possesses a lot of ice — 100 billion to 1 trillion tons — scientists working with NASA’s Messenger spacecraft reported on Thursday.

Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator for Messenger, said there was enough ice there to encase Washington, D.C., in a frozen block two and a half miles deep.

Yikes.