While Mars doesn’t have much in the way of Earth-like weather, it does evidently share one kind of weird meteorology: acid fog.
Planetary scientist Shoshanna Cole has pieced together a compelling story about how acidic vapors may have eaten at the rocks in a 100-acre area on Husband Hill in the Columbia Hills of Gusev Crater on Mars. She used a variety of data gathered by multiple instruments on the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover Spirit to tease out information from exposures of the ancient bedrock. She will be presenting her work on Monday, Nov. 2, in Baltimore, Maryland, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.
The work focused on the ‘Watchtower Class’ outcrops on Cumberland Ridge and the Husband Hill summit, said Cole, who is an assistant professor at Ithaca College and began studying the area for her Ph.D. thesis at Cornell University.
“The special thing about Watchtower Class is that it’s very widespread and we see it in different locations. As far as we can tell, it’s part of the ground there,” which means that these rocks record environments that existed on Mars billions of years ago. [More at links]