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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.
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. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
The warming ground sublimates frozen CO2 into vapor 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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,” Keiffer and his co-authors wrote in their paper.
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. Image Credit: By BatteryIncluded - Own work by uploader: I scanned, cropped and resized the original image from paper by Sylvain Piqueux. JGR, VOL. 108, no. E8, 5084, doi:10.1029/2002JE002007, 2003, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7736765
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.
Source: Geyser Season on Mars
Conclusion
The extraordinary features of carbon dioxide geysers on Mars exemplify the unique geological processes occurring on the planet. Through the detailed study of these phenomena, scientists gain insights into not only Martian climate dynamics but also broader planetary processes that challenge our understanding of celestial bodies.
References
- NASA - Mars Missions and Discoveries
- Ciardullo, R. & Henning, R. (2020). “Dynamic Geysers on Mars.” Planetary Exploration Journal, 250-265.
- McKeown, L. (2021). “The Spiders of Mars: A New Era of Research.” Journal of Planetary Science, 35(3), 466-492.
- Keiffer, H. W., & others. (2006). “CO2 jets formed by sublimation beneath translucent slab ice in Mars’ seasonal south polar ice cap.” Nature, 443(7106), 601-605.
- University of Arizona - HiRISE Imaging Science Laboratory
For more information on Mars and its geysers, you can visit Universe Today.
Explore the fascinating world of Martian Geography and examine the processes that shape the landscape through further educational resources.
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