A spectacular collapse feature at Arsia Mons

Scroll down to read this post.

Readers!

The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.

For this two-week campaign, I am offering a special deal to encourage donations. Donations of $200 will get a free autographed copy of the new paperback edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, while donations of $250 will get a free autographed copy of the new hardback edition. If you desire a copy, make sure you provide me your address with your donation.

As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:

4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to

Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.

January 10, 2018 3:55 pm Robert Zimmerman

Collapse at Arsia Mons

Cool image time! This post could be called an update to my January 8th post, Exploring Arsia Mons. In that post I had compiled together the ten images of Arsia Mons, the southernmost volcano in the line of three giant volcanoes on Mars, that JPL had highlighted over several weeks in early January.

Today, I decided to do some of my own exploration of some of the many images taken of Arsia Mons by all of the Martian orbiters. My goal had been to explore the volcano’s western slopes (an area that had not been featured in the JPL releases) because that is the area where research has found evidence of past glacial activity as well as seasonal water clouds. I haven’t finished that survey, but in the process I came across a spectacular image of a collapse that had been visible in image nine of the January 8th post, but did not stand out there because of the lighting. The image on the right is that better image, cropped to focus in on the collapse itself.

The material at the base of the wall resembles piled up mud, which suggests this collapse is a Martian version of a mud slide. If so, it also suggests the presence of liquid. At the same time, the muddy look might not be from liquid but because of the lighter Martian gravity causing avalanches to be appear different there. The light gravity means material is not as dense, so when it collapses it might break apart more easily into a sandy type flow.

I am only an amateur geologist, so my theories here should not be taken very seriously. Nonetheless, I am sure there are planetary geologists who have looked at this closely because of the information about Martian geology that they can glean from it. I’d be curious to hear their thoughts.

Meanwhile, my exploration of the western slopes of Arsia Mons will continue. In Pioneer the science fiction book I wrote in the early 1980s (now available), I placed my Martian colony in Mangala Valles, a meandering canyon to the west of Olympus Mons that feeds out from the higher southern regions into the lower northern flat plains where even then some scientists thought an ocean might have once existed. My thinking then was that this might be a good location to find underground water. It now appears, with our greater knowledge, that the slopes of the volcanoes themselves might be more promising, and I am curious to find the most likely places in this region where a future colony might end up.

2 comments

mivenho

January 11, 2018 at 5:04 pm

Subsequent impact craters imply that this collapse event occurred “long” ago.
Robert Zimmerman

January 11, 2018 at 5:18 pm

mivenho: What you think are impact craters are likely not that, but sinkholes or collapses into voids below. I don’t see anything about any of these collapses that suggest impacts.

Unfortunately, the website did not provide a scale. Based on the overall context image, the width of this collapse is likely at least 8 to 10 miles wide, with a depth from 1 to 4 miles. This single avalanche was very very big, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon however formed over millions of years, slowly. This collapse appears to have formed in a single event, in mere minutes.

A spectacular collapse feature at Arsia Mons

2 comments

Leave a Reply