Gas jet plumes unveil mystery of 'spiders' on Mars

This dramatic scene emerges from new research by a team of Mars scientists that includes ASU's Phil Christensen. The research report, co-authored with Hugh Kieffer (U.S. Geological Survey, retired) and Timothy Titus (USGS), appeared in the Aug. 17 issue of the scientific journal Nature. The new work solves a longstanding Martian polar riddle.
"If you were there, you'd be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice," Christensen says.

Looking down, the observer would see dark ground below the 3-foot-thick ice layer.

"All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air," he says.

Visitors also would feel the vibration through their spacesuit boots, he says.

"The ice slab you're standing on is levitated above the ground by the pressure of gas at the base of the ice," Christensen says.

Mystery markings

The team began its research in an attempt to explain what caused mysterious dark spots, fan-like markings and spider-shaped features on the icecap at the Martian south pole. The dark spots - typically 50 to 150 feet wide and spaced several hundred feet apart - appear every southern spring as the sun rises over the icecap. They last for three or four months and then vanish, only to reappear the next year, after winter's cold has deposited a fresh layer of ice on the cap. Most spots even seem to recur at the same locations.

"Originally, scientists thought the spots were patches of warm, bare ground exposed as the ice disappeared," Christensen says. "But observations made with THEMIS on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter told us the spots were nearly as cold as the carbon dioxide ice, which is at minus 198 degrees Fahrenheit."

That finding suggested the spots were just a thin layer of dark material lying on top of the ice and kept chilled by it.

THEMIS is the Thermal Emission Imaging System, a multiple-wavelength camera. Christensen, who is a Regents' Professor of Geological Sciences at ASU's new School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, designed THEMIS and is the instrument's principal investigator. The new school houses ASU's renowned Mars Space Flight Facility.

Using more than 200 THEMIS visible and infrared images, the team studied one area on the icecap, at 99 degrees east longitude and 86.3 degrees south latitude, from the end of southern winter through mid-summer. The spots began to appear when the sun was only half a degree high, then quickly became more numerous over several days.

"A few places remained spot-free for more than 100 days," Christensen says. "Then they developed a large number in a week."

The scientists saw that fan-shaped dark markings didn't form until days or weeks after the spots first appeared, yet some fans grew to half a mile in length. Even more puzzling was the origin of the "spiders," grooves eroded into the surface under the ice. The grooves converge at points directly beneath a spot.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University

As winter turns to spring at the south polar ice cap of Mars, the rising sun reveals dark spots and fans emerging from the cold polar night. Using visual images (left) and temperature data (right) from the Thermal Emission Imaging system on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, scientists have built a new model for the origin of the dark markings. Scientists propose the markings come from dark sand and dust strewn by high-speed jets of carbon-dioxide gas. These erupt from under a layer of carbon-dioxide ice that forms each Martian winter.




Image Credit: Arizona State University/Ron Miller

Sand-laden jets shoot into the polar sky in this view by noted space artist Ron Miller. It shows the Martian south polar ice cap as southern spring begins.




Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

Dark spots (left) and 'fans' appear to scribble dusty hieroglyphics on top of the Martian south polar cap in two high-resolution Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Orbiter Camera images taken in southern spring. Each image is about 3-kilometers wide (2-miles).




Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

A delicate pattern, like that of a spider web, appears on top of the Mars residual polar cap, after the seasonal carbon-dioxide ice slab has disappeared. Next spring, these will likely mark the sites of vents when the carbon-dioxide ice cap returns. This Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Orbiter Camera image is about 3-kilometers wide (2-miles).

An icy greenhouse

"The key to figuring out the 'spiders' and the spots was thinking through a physical model for what was happening," Christensen says.

The whole process, he explains, begins during Mars' frigid Antarctic winter, when temperatures drop to minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit. That's so cold that the Martian air - 95 percent carbon dioxide - freezes out directly onto the surface of the permanent polar cap, which is made of water ice covered with layers of dust and sand.

This seasonal deposit begins as a layer of dusty carbon dioxide frost. Over the winter, the frost recrystallizes and becomes denser - a process called annealing. The dust and sand particles caught in the frost slowly sink. By spring, with the sun about to rise, the frost layer has become a slab of semitransparent ice about 3 feet thick, lying on a substrate of dark sand and dust.

Sunlight passing through the slab reaches the dark material and warms it enough that the ice touching the ground sublimates (turns directly into gas). As days pass and the sun rises higher, sublimation continues. Before long, the warmed substrate generates a reservoir of pressurized gas under the slab, lifting it off the ground.

Big blowouts

Soon after, weak spots in the slab break through, forming narrow vents, and high-pressure gas roars out at speeds of 100 mph or more. Under the slab, the gas erodes the ground as it rushes toward the vents, snatching up loose particles of sand and carving networks of grooves that converge on the vents.

"Once a 'spider' becomes established, it affects the surface so that a vent will form in the same place the following year," Christensen says.

As they erupt, the jets carry loose sand and particles high in the air. The largest and heaviest particles fall closest to the vent, piling up around it to make the spots. As lighter sand grains tossed out by the jet blow downwind, they create the fans, which can extend tens to hundreds of yards. The lightest particles, meanwhile, drift away on the wind to form a thin layer of dust.

"It's like separating wheat and chaff," Christensen says. "The finest-grained materials are carried off by the wind, while coarser grains are sifted again and again, year after year."

The vents and jets continue to erupt until the ice slab completely sublimates and vanishes. This mechanism "is unlike anything that occurs on Earth," he says.

Arizona State University News Release