Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on July 13, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labels this “Irregular Cellular Structures around Crater in Southern Mid-Latitudes.” The image to the right highlights those structures in the northern half of this four-mile-wide unnamed crater.

What formed these strange shapes? The latitude is 37 degrees south, so this material is likely glacial debris, impregnated with near-surface ice that is mostly protected from sublimation by a coating of Martian dust. The weird shapes likely formed from two processes, either some of that dust blew away to allow the ice to sublimate into gas, or the many climate cycles of Mars caused the material to warp with each new cycle as the changing climate either laid down or removed a layer of ice.

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, deep within the southern cratered highlands of Mars and parallel to the region on the northern perimeter of Argyre Basin to the west, where orbital data has found a plentitude of glaciers.

If you look at the inset, you will note that larger nearby crater to the northeast has similar cellular features. In fact, all the nearby craters have this glacial debris in their interiors. There appears to be a lot of near-surface ice buried in these craters at this location.

The geological question is why the strange cellular shapes? I posited a wild guess above, but I wouldn’t put much faith on it.

The explorer’s question is more significant. The glaciers on Mars do not appear to be confined to only certain places in the mid-latitudes, as first summised from orbital data. It increasingly appears that there are glaciers throughout the mid-latitudes, in craters, on mountainsides, in canyons.