Categories: Mars

Feast Your Mind on This: Strange “Brain Terrain” on Mars

It doesn’t take much thought to understand why this landscape on Mars is called “brain terrain” — the swirling lobes of ice, part of a large glacial deposit in Mars’ northern hemisphere, uncannily resemble the texture of a brain — or at the very least a brain coral!

What causes this strange landscape? Find out below:

It’s suggested that brain terrain is the result of the thermal stress and contraction, followed by sublimation, of these large ice deposits, laid down during a mid-latitude glaciation period ten to 100 million years ago. (Read more in this 2009 paper by Brown University’s Joseph Levy et al.)

This image was obtained by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter on August 23, 2013. See the original RGB color scan here.

Source: University of Arizona’s HiRISE site

Jason Major

A graphic designer in Rhode Island, Jason writes about space exploration on his blog Lights In The Dark, Discovery News, and, of course, here on Universe Today. Ad astra!

Recent Posts

Flowing Martian Water was Protected by Sheets of Carbon Dioxide

Mars' ancient climate is one of our Solar System's most perplexing mysteries. The planet was…

10 hours ago

Japan Launches the First Wooden Satellite to Space

Space debris, which consists of pieces of spent rocket stages, satellites, and other objects launched…

11 hours ago

You Can Build a Home Radio Telescope to Detect Clouds of Hydrogen in the Milky Way

If I ask you to picture a radio telescope, you probably imagine a large dish…

14 hours ago

A Space Walking Robot Could Build a Giant Telescope in Space

The Hubble Space Telescope was carried to space inside the space shuttle Discovery and then…

2 days ago

New Report Details What Happened to the Arecibo Observatory

In 1963, the Arecibo Observatory became operational on the island of Puerto Rico. Measuring 305…

2 days ago

We Understand Rotating Black Holes Even Less Than We Thought

The theory of black holes has several mathematical oddities. Recent research shows our understanding of…

3 days ago