The mysterious floating mass, dubbed the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC), frequently emerges above Arsia Mons, a 12-mile-tall (20 km) extinct volcano located in the Tharsis region, just south of the Red Planet's equator. The water vapor cloud was first spotted in 2018 by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and has since appeared nearly every morning throughout Mars' spring and summer, when increased solar radiation triggers strong surface winds. But it lasts only a few hours each day, before fully evaporating.
Although the Red Planet is no stranger to giant dust clouds and occasional "iridescent streaks" of carbon dioxide, it is almost completely devoid of atmospheric water vapor. That makes it extremely rare for puffy, Earth-like clouds to form there, let alone ones so vast. As a result, scientists have struggled to explain this whacky weather.
The AMEC forms when summer winds push water vapor up and over the 12-mile-high slopes of Arsia Mons. But it only lasts for a couple of hours at a time. (Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin)
"To create the AMEC in our modelling, we found that we needed to include some exotic physics … physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature," study first author Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who was affiliated with Sorbonne University in Paris at the time of the study, said in a statement. "Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped."
On Earth, clouds form via a process called heterogeneous nucleation, in which moist air cools and condenses into ice crystals that form around tiny atmospheric particles, such as dust, salt, pollen or soot. But while Mars has plenty of atmospheric dust, that's not what's happening there.
The researchers call this "homogeneous nucleation" and say it has never been seen before in a planetary atmosphere. "It's wholly unexpected," Hernández-Bernal added.
Arsia Mons is the second-tallest volcano on Mars behind Olympus Mons, but is twice as tall as Mount Everest. This image, captured by NASA's Odyssey orbiter, helps give a scale of how huge the Martian mountain really is. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)Given that modern-day Mars is almost completely devoid of water, it may seem unlikely that its humidity levels could reach such lofty heights. However, the Mars Express data tells a different story.
So where does all this water come from? Some of it is already in the atmosphere, but some likely originates at the summit of Arsia Mons, which is covered with a thick layer of frost, the researchers suggested.
"A big success"
"We don't have nearly as much information about Mars' atmosphere as we do about Earth's, so reproducing the AMEC to this degree is a big success for the model," Hernández-Bernal said.
Mars Express has been closely monitoring the AMEC since 2018. These photos show the cloud appearing over consecutive days in July 2020. (Image credit: ESA/GCP/UPV/EHU Bilbao)RELATED STORIES
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The discovery is also a reminder that, despite sharing the same basic principles, weather systems do not behave the same on other worlds as they do on Earth, which could have big implications for solar system exploration and the hunt for extraterrestrial life on distant exoplanets.
"While clouds on Earth and Mars seem to be governed by the same 'rules', understanding this exotic Martian cloud required exotic physics — and this may be true elsewhere in the cosmos," Wilson said.
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