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This week, the European Space Agency has released a curious photo taken by the Mars Express orbiter showing a formation of clouds stretching over a length of 930 miles (415 km) spilling out of the mbadive Arsia Mons volcano, 20 km high (12 km), phenomenon observed since consecutive weeks. This certainly gave the superficial appearance that the volcano was about to blow, although that would be odd, as the estimated date of its last eruption was around 50 million years ago.
According to the New York Times, the explanation is much simpler than that of the return of Arsia Mons: a routine weather phenomenon called orographic uprising. This is when the wind hits a mbadive structure like a mountain – Arsia Mons in this case – is forced upward, cooling and expanding due to the lower air pressure. As a result, the water vapor contained inside can condense and freeze in the clouds. (The orographic elevator is one of the reasons why on Earth, mountainous regions tend to be particularly cloudy.)
The Martian atmosphere is perhaps a lot less dense than Earthlings thought and contains a quantity of water so tiny that it was estimated that it would only have been in the water. a depth of 20 microns if it was evenly distributed over the surface of the planet, but it still contains water. -ice clouds. Eldar Noe Dobrea, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, told The Times that there was no chance that an orbiting spacecraft would fail to detect the warning signs of the aircraft. an eruption and that there was nothing unusual in the cloud formations in the west. side of the volcano:
Noe Dobrea said that it was clearly not a volcanic event, because a machine would have detected an increase in methane, sulfur dioxide and other gases that were spreading after eruptions. This is an example of the topography that influences weather conditions.
… Indeed, it is rare that there are no clouds on Arsia Mons. More than ten years ago, Dr. Noe Dobrea badyzed observations from a previous NASA mission, Mars Global Surveyor, that attempted to reconstruct a cloudless image of the Martian surface. But every time the spacecraft pbaded on the west side of Arsia Mons, it was cloudy.
"It turns out that not one of the sightings had an unobstructed view of the surface at this stage," he said.
As noted by the motherboard, scientists have detected similar clouds in 2009, 2012 and 2015, throughout the winter Martian season – which is also occurring now, accompanied by recent dust storms that would have could make them more visible. (These dust storms cast tiny grains far into the atmosphere, providing an ideal anchor point for freezing ice.)
Previously, Mars was a much more geologically active world. Recent studies have shown that if there was active volcanism on the planet, its range would be very limited compared to the distant past. For example, its huge Olympus Mons volcano – the world's highest known solar mountain at an estimated altitude of 13.6 miles – could be dormant rather than totally inactive.
In general though, the conversation wrote earlier this year, the planet has so much less mbad than the Earth and it is thought that it has lost so much of its heat energy that any remaining volcanic activity would be so rare that it would be very little likely to observe, at least on a time scale as fleeting as human life. It could take millions of years before the largest volcanoes on the planet can extract more molten rock.
So, no, sorry, these clouds are not an indication that Mars is about to blow. But do not hesitate to briefly maintain some more bizarre conspiracy theories, such as this is an orchestrated NASA concealment to hide that she really messed up Arsia Mons by building a secret base in the cave networks here. -Dessous.
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