ripples
October 25, 2013
A piece of Mars: Barchan, or crescent dunes, are generally thought to form from winds blowing from a single direction. Reality isn’t usually that nice. Here are two barchans with crescent-shaped slip faces on their eastern (right) sides, indicating that […]
August 8, 2013
A piece of Mars: Creamy dunes (or maybe they’re very large ripples) wind their way northward between mesas. More recently darker, more mobile sand (bluish here) has piled up against the western slopes of the mesas. We don’t know why […]
June 21, 2013
A piece of Mars: Yep, these are dunes shaped into polygons. Each “cell” is about 25 m (~80 ft) across. The crests of these things are outlined in blue, as if somebody traced them with a pen (well it’s stretched […]
June 17, 2013
A piece of Mars: In the lower left of the image, a small hill stands above a plain partly covered by stabilized ripples. Boulders have rolled down the hill as it slowly erodes. If these ripples aren’t ever activated by […]
June 5, 2013
A piece of Mars: Here in the bottom of a crater in Coprates Chasma is the intersection of two sets of ripples: dark, dust-free ripples at the bottom of the crater, and lighter ripples formed from debris that has come […]
May 24, 2013
A piece of Mars: The source of dune sand on Mars is normally something of a mystery. But here on the interior wall of a small crater it appears that small gullies have eroded sediment from the wall and carried […]
May 21, 2013
A piece of Mars: Swirly loops form on the martian surface as dust devils pass by, cleaning up dust on the surface and revealing the dark, rippled dune beneath. Every year the swirls get cleaned off and reform — such […]
May 2, 2013
A piece of Mars. The dark circle (~170 m across) in the middle of the picture is the interior of what used to be a crater. It’s now almost completely eroded away, probably by the wind. Small dunes have formed […]
April 22, 2013
A piece of Mars: Everybody else loves this image because it shows an inverted channel — the remains of a stream that once flowed through this area. But I love it because the little dunes were also formed by a […]