Martian Sand May Be Boiling—Watch the Popping Action
A newly discovered geological process might help explain how water creates seasonal gullies on Mars’s barren slopes.
For the last five years, scientists have stared agog at Mars’s surface, bewitched by gullies etched into the landscape, seemingly by flows of salty water.
But a new study demonstrates that these formations and others like them might be carved by a process unlike anything seen on Earth: boiling meltwater that flings dirt around like popping popcorn.
The unexpected geological process, described on May 2 in Nature Geoscience, was re-created in the lab during a simulated Martian day. The finding could help explain Mars’s recurring slope lineae, enigmatic gullies that have had planetary scientists scratching their heads since their discovery in 2011.
The gullies’ dark colors, incremental growth, and floors filled with salt deposits suggest that briny water flows on modern Mars,
