GabyMars is a cold, seemingly dead planet, but it’s also incredibly beautiful. NASA has released images of natural phenomena we will never see on Earth. They look magical and a little eerie.
Martian Photo Chronicles
The HiRISE camera aboard NASA‘s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed carbon dioxide geysers on Mars.
Mars has a thin atmosphere that’s about 95 percent carbon dioxide. In winter, CO2 freezes in the planet’s polar regions and forms a thick, translucent layer on the surface. It stays frozen for months. As spring arrives, temperatures slowly rise.
Sunlight passes through the frozen CO2 layer and warms the ground beneath. As the ground heats, the CO2 sublimates — turning directly from solid to gas — and the vapor builds up beneath the solid layer. Eventually the gas bursts through weak spots in the ice, creating geysers that spray dark material onto the frozen surface.
Sometimes eruptions, reaching speeds of about 160 km/h, carve dark areas that resemble spiders.
Researchers call those patterned polar regions “arachnid” or “spider” terrain because of their radiating channels. ScienceAlert reports that NASA scientists recreated spider terrain in laboratory conditions to study how it forms.
“Spiders are strange and beautiful geological formations in their own right,” said Lauren McKeon from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The process that explains the formation of these natural wonders is called the Kieffer model.
Hugh Kieffer, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, published a 2006 paper in Nature explaining this mechanism. The paper was titled “CO2 Jets Formed by Sublimation Under a Translucent Layer of Ice in the Seasonal Southern Polar Cap of Mars.”
The authors of the study wrote: “We hypothesize that the seasonal ice cap forms an impermeable, translucent layer of ice with CO2 sublimating from the base, accumulating high-pressure gas beneath the layer. This gas lifts the ice, which eventually cracks, creating high-speed CO2 jets.”
Maybe we’re biased to think nothing is more beautiful than Earth. But Mars has natural wonders unlike anything on Earth, especially its CO2 geysers and the patterns they leave behind.
