Mars was once supposedly almost another Earth, with flowing water that froze into massive mountains of ice.
Because ice sheets and glaciers on Earth tend to slip and slide, they crawl across land and carve out distinct geophysical features including linear grooves, ridges and inverted hills. Scientists previously thought that glaciers on Mars remained frozen in time due to the lack of similar features. Planetary scientists Anna Grau Galofre led a study that found glaciers on Mars do in fact move – they just happen to move extremely slow.
Instead, landforms on Mars created by glacial melt and movement are mostly ridges and valleys with shallow, undulating channels. Scientists had previously thought that Martian glaciers froze directly to the ground when they formed because Mars is missing Earth’s more pronounced glacial terrain.
The researchers discovered that it is Earth’s gravity that causes meltwater to pool beneath a glacier instead of draining right away. This pooled water makes the glacier move faster. However, on Mars, lower gravity means drainage occurs much faster, Grau Galofre and her team found that not as much water accumulates below the ice, so Martian glaciers are not able to travel as fast or as far.
Some glaciers on Mars might have had help from below. The researchers hypothesized that to push the glaciers any faster, there would have had to be enough stress to make up for weaker gravity. Creep deformation is a phenomenon that occurs when both temperature and pressure from the weight of the heavy ice above, known as overburden pressure, put enough stress on ice for it to start deforming. On Earth, creep deformation is not nearly as common as the sliding of ice which results from glacial melt that pools beneath the ice.
https://www.space.com/mars-glaciers-slower-moving-faster-drainage