Although numerous Mars rovers have already combed the surface of the Red Planet, its ground still holds many secrets. Now, researchers have investigated one of them on a closer level and immediately felt transported to a familiar world out of a science fiction novel.
Mars: Mysterious Landforms
The new discovery on Mars has given researchers to make quite an interesting comparison. “It felt like I was watching the sandworms in the film Dune,” geoscientist Dr. Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University explained. He’s specifically referring to the gully-like depressions in the ground surrounded by small sand walls. They seem as if they were created by human hands or piled up by animals.
In a study, the research team investigated how these enigmatic formations could have actually occurred. The most likely determined cause – CO₂ ice blocks. During the Martian winter, when temperatures can drop to minus 184 degrees Fahrenheit, ice forms on the dunes.
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Explosions in the Ice
However, towards the end of winter, the dune slopes warm up, and the ice blocks break off. The research team recreated this in a simulation, “We let a block of CO2 ice fall from the top of the slope and observed what happened. After finding the right slope, we finally saw results. The CO2 ice block began to dig into the slope and move downwards just like a burrowing mole or the sandworms from Dune. It looked very strange.”
Due to the thin atmosphere and the large temperature difference between the warm dune sand and the ice, the underside of the ice turns into gas. Because the resulting gas occupies a drastically larger volume than the initial ice, the material rapidly expands and violently bursts. The simulation showed, “how this high gas pressure blasts away the sand around the block in all directions”.
This causes the block to dig into the slope and become enclosed in a hollow surrounded by these small sand walls. However, the process is not yet complete. The block continues to slide, leaving behind a long, deep gully with sand walls on both sides, which is exactly what the researchers observed on Mars.
Sources: Utrecht University, “Sliding and burrowing blocks of CO2 create sinuous linear dune gullies on Martian dunes by explosive sublimation-induced particle transport” (Geophysical Research Letters 2025)
This article was originally published on futurezone.de / 4P.de and has been carefully translated.