ripples
July 17, 2020
July 17, 2020 A couple months ago I wrote a blog post about defrosting dunes in Jeans crater, some wild southern polar dunes on Mars. Well it’s been that time of year on Mars, so I’m going to show some […]
June 15, 2020
June 15, 2020 Utopia Planitia is an ancient plain in the northern lowlands of Mars, thought to be made of volcanic rocks that were buried, more than 3 billion years ago, by sediments carried by water coming down from the […]
May 26, 2020
May 26, 2020 There are sand dunes near both the north and south poles of Mars. The ones I’m showing today are on the floor of Jeans crater, which is down at 69.5°S (for reference, on Earth, some bits of […]
August 21, 2019
Aug. 21, 2019 Trolling through the HiRISE image catalog, I came across some dunes that look a bit like bacteria. (Well okay, they look like some sort of microbe to my eye, which is highly untrained in looking at microbes, […]
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 […]
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 […]
August 21, 2018
There’s a lot we don’t understand about the sediment on Mars. Water, wind, ice, changing temperatures, and volcanic eruptions can all break rocks into grains small enough for the wind to transport. The smallest grains are lofted by the wind, […]