While Earth has water and ice in abundance, the Martian surface is mostly dry and barren. There are ice deposits around but the vehicles harvesting this resource can’t be as picky - contaminated ice would still need to be extracted and purified, but would take longer to make the water usable. In turn, this would reduce production while time and energy was spent on this less efficient refining and purification. These impurities could range from dust particles which could be removed fairly easily via filtration, right down to dangerous chemicals or metals which have leeched into the ice over many years and are harder to separate.
The water on Mars is far from Earth’s crystal clear refreshing spring water. It’s full of salts called perchlorates which can be highly toxic to humans. On Earth there are limits on how much of these salts can be present in drinking water as it can cause thyroid problems and harm the digestive system and impact the skin. Desalination can help us remove perchlorates on Earth, and it’s how we are able to make seawater drinkable, but because the salinity of the water on Mars is so high it would require more energy and that’s not always easy to come by. The vehicles harvesting ice may not have the option to be picky about how contaminated the ice is, and just have to spend longer ensuring it’s drinkable, which in turn has a knock on impact on the speed and quantity of production.
Contaminated Ice impacts any cards which have water as an output. The number of cards vulnerable to this hazard is very small, but it means an intense hazard could have a huge impact on production.
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These hazards inflict 50 points of damage each time they damage a sponsorship card.
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