Brain terrain on top of Martian mountains
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 26, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is labeled by the scientists “Brain Terrain on Floor of Crater in Warrego Valles.”
Brain terrain is a geological feature entirely unique to Mars that remains unexplained in any way by geologists. The scientists know it is almost certainly related to near-surface ice and its sublimation into gas, but their theories as to its precise formation process remain incomplete and unconvincing, even to them.
In this case the brain terrain’s interweaving nodules seem to show flow patterns, but strangely those patterns go around depressions and hollows. Yet, the overall flow direction also seems to point downhill towards the slope on the image’s right edge.
The white dot on the overview map to the right, in the southernmost and highest part of Claritas Fossae, marks this location, in a region dubbed Warrego Valles because of the drainage patterns that flow south from these mountains. As the image’s label states, this brain terrain is located on top of what looks to be a large patch glacial material almost filling the floor of an old and very eroded 10-mile-wide crater, found near the center-left of this MRO context camera image taken on September 16, 2007. The crater itself is near the top of the mountains, at a somewhat high elevation.
This location, at 41 degrees south latitude, is in the mid-latitudes where scientists are finding ample evidence of glacial features. The brain terrain, while associated with those features, remains a mystery of its own. And this picture really doesn’t help explain it in any large measure.
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Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 26, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is labeled by the scientists “Brain Terrain on Floor of Crater in Warrego Valles.”
Brain terrain is a geological feature entirely unique to Mars that remains unexplained in any way by geologists. The scientists know it is almost certainly related to near-surface ice and its sublimation into gas, but their theories as to its precise formation process remain incomplete and unconvincing, even to them.
In this case the brain terrain’s interweaving nodules seem to show flow patterns, but strangely those patterns go around depressions and hollows. Yet, the overall flow direction also seems to point downhill towards the slope on the image’s right edge.
The white dot on the overview map to the right, in the southernmost and highest part of Claritas Fossae, marks this location, in a region dubbed Warrego Valles because of the drainage patterns that flow south from these mountains. As the image’s label states, this brain terrain is located on top of what looks to be a large patch glacial material almost filling the floor of an old and very eroded 10-mile-wide crater, found near the center-left of this MRO context camera image taken on September 16, 2007. The crater itself is near the top of the mountains, at a somewhat high elevation.
This location, at 41 degrees south latitude, is in the mid-latitudes where scientists are finding ample evidence of glacial features. The brain terrain, while associated with those features, remains a mystery of its own. And this picture really doesn’t help explain it in any large measure.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows 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.
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.
Those features appear to have some depth to them. Look at the original image of the larger impact crater at the bottom of the cropped image. The features at the lower right-hand perimeter appear to extend downward into the crater wall for an appreciable distance as though the edge of the crater wall had sliced through them. They also appear to be whitish-colored in the interstitial space between the individual raised lumps of the features.
This time it doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen in melted/sublimated snowscapes; it just looks weird.
Blackwing1:
I would submit that the crater is not an impact, but a sinkhole. The ‘brain terrain’ was clearly pre-existing, but where is the impact ejecta?
The meteor impact in the picture is a symmetrical cone with no ejecta at the rim, in fact I see no loose material like Sandune‘s anywhere. Perhaps an impact pressure wave fractured the hard ground and those cracks widened out overtime? I’ve broken slate, glass, and homemade toffee… But the only thing that comes close to this type of fracturing is heat treated window glass.
At least no one‘s claiming that it’s an ancient Martian housing complex…
Upon further examination, black wing has a point on the slope, and the whitish lumps. In the crater you can see the white extends down the wall so it’s not just a surface phenomenon.
It looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place it, then I remembered a oat bran cereal? floating in milk from when I was a child. A log jam a frozen volcanic pumas flowing downhill between soft mountains that most have all eroded away leaving depressions.
Have you ever squeezed Play-Doh through the hair maker/spaghetti press? When you squeeze it together to make a solid lump again it retains the individual shape even though it’s in a mass. Like a river of viscous cat turds from a mud volcano…
Leave the mind flayers be.