Ah, the yearly refresh of spring. Temperatures are warming, snows are sublimating, large sheets of dry ice are breaking free from dune tops and sliding like giant snow boards down the sandy slopes….
Doesn’t sound like the spring thaws of Earth, much.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its high-powered HiRISE camera, which has been capturing extremely detailed pictures all over the surface of Mars for a few years now, has happened upon a number of surprising, curious and often captivating landscape features, many of which have inferred the action of dynamic weather processes on Mars.
Far from being the dead desert world that it first appeared in the 1960’s, images from MRO and other orbiting spacecraft, as well as several landers and rovers, have revealed that Mars is alive with activity—maybe not alive with actual life, but certainly a world that exhibits daily and seasonal weather patterns that we would find familiar, as well as some that we would not.
There’s an image captured by MRO that shows a downhill-slithering brigade of channels that present a different appearance than others that look more like the features of liquid-carved gullies and streambeds. The long trenches gouged in the sandy slopes have an almost hair-like pattern, rooted at the tops of their runs and cascading downhill to blunt ends at the bottom.