Eerie Features Seen on Mars Are Unlike Anything on Earth

Though it's a cold, dead planet, Mars still has its own natural beauty about it. This image shows us something we'll never see on Earth.

Mars has only a thin, tenuous atmosphere, and most of it (95%) is carbon dioxide. When Martian winter arrives, CO2 freezes and forms a thick coating on the ground in the polar regions. It lies there dormant for months.

As spring approaches, temperatures gradually warm. Sunlight passes through the translucent frozen layer of CO2, warming the ground beneath it.

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The warming ground sublimates frozen CO2 into vapour that accumulates under the solid CO2.

Eventually, the gas escapes through weak spots in the ice. It can erupt into geysers that spread darker material out onto the frozen surface.

Artist's impression of geysers at the Martian south polar icecap as southern spring begins. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University/Ron Miller)

The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of these geysers on Mars in October 2018.

It has also captured other images of Martian CO2 geysers.

This HiRISE image shows different dark shapes and bright spots on sand dunes in Mars' North Pole region. The bright spots are where frozen CO2 sublimated into gas and erupted, spreading darker material on the surface. (Harvard University's John A. Paulson School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences)

Some of Mars' CO2 geysers erupt and create dark spots as large as 1 km across. They are fueled by considerable power and can erupt at speeds up to 160 km/h.

Sometimes the eruptions create dark regions under the ice which look like spiders.

This NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image, acquired on May 13, 2018, during winter at the South Pole of Mars, shows a carbon dioxide ice cap covering the region and as the sun returns in the spring, "Mars spiders" begin to emerge from the landscape. (NASA)

Scientists are calling these features araneiform terrain or spider terrain. They are found in clusters that give the surface a wrinkled appearance. NASA scientists recreated these patterns in lab tests to understand the processes behind their formation.

"The spiders are strange, beautiful geologic features in their own right," said Lauren McKeown of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

These strange-looking landscape features form at Mars' south pole in springtime. They're created when frozen carbon dioxide turns to gas in the rising temperatures. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

The process that explains how the CO2 cycle creates these features is called the Keiffer model.

Hugh Keiffer was with the US Geological Survey when he and his colleagues published a paper explaining the model in 2006 in Nature titled "CO2 jets formed by sublimation beneath translucent slab ice in Mars' seasonal south polar ice cap."

"We propose that the seasonal ice cap forms an impermeable, translucent slab of CO2 ice that sublimates from the base, building up high-pressure gas beneath the slab," Keiffer and his co-authors wrote in their paper.

"This gas levitates the ice, which eventually ruptures, producing high-velocity CO2 vents that erupt sand-sized grains in jets to form the spots and erode the channels.

This simple illustration shows what happens when Spring comes and frozen CO2 is warmed by solar insolation. As the CO2 sublimates into gas, pressure builds, and it erupts through weaknesses in the seasonal cap, carrying dust with it that creates dark spots on the surface. (By BatteryIncluded/Public Domain)

Maybe humans are biased, but there's nothing as beautiful and splendorous as Earth. Generations of poets have acclaimed its beauty to the point where it borders on the spiritual.

However, when it comes to CO2 geysers and the natural patterns they create, Mars has something that Earth doesn't.

"These processes are unlike any observed on Earth," the authors of the 2006 paper stated.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.