March 4, 2019
On Earth, really old windblown dunes don’t usually survive long enough to become part of the geologic rock record. Dunes are made of unconsolidated sand, which is easily eroded by just about anything, so it takes special circumstances to keep […]
February 11, 2019
When I look for something to blog about, I usually go to the HiRISE catalog to see if there are any new pictures that I find interesting. Today this lovely dune field caught my eye: HiRISE images are about 6 […]
December 27, 2018
InSight landed in Elysium Planitia on 26 November, 2018, about a month ago as of this writing. Pictures show that it’s a flat place, with small scattered rocks lying around. Unlike in Gale crater, where Curiosity is slowly working its […]
October 18, 2018
Right now, the Fourth Landing Site Workshop for the Mars 2020 rover mission is happening. It’s the last one, and in a few hours the scientists attending the workshop will vote on which of four sites they think the rover […]
October 8, 2018
Noachis Terra is an ancient terrain on Mars, located in the mid southern highlands. It’s the home of many dune fields, big and small. Here’s a fairly small one. You can’t see it, but this is the floor of an […]
September 28, 2018
It’s a rough day. A tsunami in Indonesia has killed many people, and the pain is so fresh that there’s not even a death count yet. A couple of my good friends are going through various personal crises that will […]
September 24, 2018
Being a geomorphologist and reading a landscape is a little bit like being one of the forensic scientists on CSI (or choose your own favorite investigative show). A Mars geomorphologist usually has to do this entirely by remote sensing. So […]
September 13, 2018
Dunes are just so amazingly beautiful. I’ll never get over how nature can sculpt such regular patterns into endlessly overlapping structures. Here’s a small bit of a dune field trapped up high between mountains in the middle of Coprates Chasma. […]
August 28, 2018
Richardson crater is located at 72ºS, about 1000 km (~621 miles) from the south pole of Mars. It’s a moderately large crater, about 90 km (56) miles across, and it’s mostly filled by one of the biggest dune fields in […]