Bizarre shapes on Mars were created by carbon dioxide geysers

A few years ago, scientists noticed bizarre shapes on Mars that looked like dark fans. Recent studies have helped to establish that carbon dioxide is responsible for their formation. In the cold conditions of the red planet, it first freezes and then forms a geyser.

Geysers on Mars. Source: phys.org

Carbon dioxide cycle

Although it is a cold, dead planet, Mars still has its natural beauty. This image shows us something we will never see on Earth.

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

As spring approaches, the temperature gradually rises. Sunlight passes through the translucent frozen CO2 layer, warming the soil beneath.

Warming sublimates frozen CO2 into vapor, which accumulates under solid CO2. Finally, gas gets out because of weak spots in the ice. It can erupt as geysers, spreading darker matter onto the frozen surface.

Geysers on Mars

The HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took images of these geysers on Mars in October 2018. It also took other images of Martian CO2 geysers.

Some of the Martian CO2 geysers erupt and create dark spots up to 1 km across. They are powered by considerable energy and can erupt at speeds of up to 160 km/h.

Sometimes eruptions create dark areas under the ice that look like spiders.

Scientists refer to these features as araneiform terrain or spider terrain. They occur in clusters, giving the surface a wrinkled appearance. NASA scientists have reproduced these patterns in laboratory tests to understand the processes behind their formation.

Keiffer model

The process that explains how the CO2 cycle creates these features is called the Keiffer model. Hugh Keiffer was working for the U.S. Geological Survey when he and his colleagues published a paper explaining this model in Nature in 2006, titled “CO2 jets formed by sublimation beneath translucent slab ice in Mars’s 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.

Perhaps people are biased, but there is nothing more beautiful and majestic than the Earth. Generations of poets have extolled its beauty to the point where it borders on spirituality. However, when it comes to CO2 geysers and the natural patterns they create, Mars has something that Earth does not.

According to phys.org

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