Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on March 11, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The picture has been rotated so that north is to the top.

The science team describes this feature as “dark linear ridges.” Apparently the ground at this location at some point in the past tilted upward, exposing these layers and creating this 250 to 400 foot high escarpment facing south. What makes this even more intriguing is the ground was only uplifted in this one area. If you look at the full image you will see that the surrounding terrain is flat and relatively featureless.

The location is in the high southern latitudes in the Martian cratered highlands. Thus, it is likely that there is some near surface ice in these layers, and in fact the many Martian climate cycles produced by the wide swings in the planet’s rotational tilt likely contributed to making the layers themselves.

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, about 450 miles south of Hellas Basin, the basement of Mars, and about a 1,000 miles north of the south pole.

The inset, created from the global map produced by MRO’s lower resolution context camera, shows the wider area, and reveals something not obvious in the high resolution picture above. This region is routinely scoured by dust devils, so much so that the layers are hard to see because of all the tracks crossing over them. The inset shows that another outcrop also exists to the west, comparable to this one and equally obscured by the numerous dust devil tracks.

Why dust devils congregate here is a mystery, though other MRO images have shown a similar phenomenon in other places.