“What the heck?!” glaciers on Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 29, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It falls into what I call my “What the heck?!” category of Martian land-forms, simply because their shape is so strange and inexplicable it is difficult to conceive a geological process that could create them.
Nor does it help much that we know what these land-forms are made of. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside the 2,000-mile-wide northern mid-latitude strip I label glacier country, because almost every image taken shows glacial features. In this case, this strange geology is located on the floor of a canyon that is part of a large region of chaos terrain, a landscape typical of glacier country. This floor, as well as all the low areas, seems filled with glacial flows. This particular canyon appears to roughly flow downhill to the northwest, though the downhill grade in the entire region varies widely in all directions.
Based on all the orbital data, these flows are glacial in nature, the ice protected by a thin top layer of dirt and debris. The strange features at the top of all the small mesas in the picture above suggest that the wind possibly blew off the dirt and debris, exposing the ice and allowing it to sublimate away. This in turn produced the knobby hollows at the top of each mesa.
I am guessing, and no one should trust my guess considering I only make believe I’m a geologist on the internet.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 29, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It falls into what I call my “What the heck?!” category of Martian land-forms, simply because their shape is so strange and inexplicable it is difficult to conceive a geological process that could create them.
Nor does it help much that we know what these land-forms are made of. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside the 2,000-mile-wide northern mid-latitude strip I label glacier country, because almost every image taken shows glacial features. In this case, this strange geology is located on the floor of a canyon that is part of a large region of chaos terrain, a landscape typical of glacier country. This floor, as well as all the low areas, seems filled with glacial flows. This particular canyon appears to roughly flow downhill to the northwest, though the downhill grade in the entire region varies widely in all directions.
Based on all the orbital data, these flows are glacial in nature, the ice protected by a thin top layer of dirt and debris. The strange features at the top of all the small mesas in the picture above suggest that the wind possibly blew off the dirt and debris, exposing the ice and allowing it to sublimate away. This in turn produced the knobby hollows at the top of each mesa.
I am guessing, and no one should trust my guess considering I only make believe I’m a geologist on the internet.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Re: “I am guessing”
Spock: “”Mr. Scott cannot give me exact figures, Admiral, so… I will make a guess.””
Kirk: “”A guess? You, Spock? That’s extraordinary.””
Spock: [to Dr. McCoy] “”I don’t think he understands.””
McCoy: “”No, Spock. He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people’s facts.””
Robert Zimmerman is like one of my favorite professors. When talking about science, she would say:
This (XYZ) we know.
This (ZYX) we think we know.
This (XYZ, XYZ, XYZ, etc) we have no idea what this is.
The Channeled Scablands carved great gouts due to ice damage failures.
Perhaps Mars had several of these resulting in materials shoved into mesas from different directions–which remained after the water finally went AWOL.
“The Channeled Scablands” – splendid coinage. Here’s hoping it gets picked up and used by future human inhabitants of the Red Planet. It would look terrific printed on a map.