Published in Physics World, 13 Jan 2009
Can you spot the pattern in this photo of Martian rocks? If not, then don’t feel bad: according to researchers in the US and Canada the very lack of a pattern means that there must be some mechanism driving the rocks that way. Studying this process, in which built-up sand levers rocks away from one another, could help geophysicists to understand how climate has steadily transformed the surface of the red planet.
“Rather than look at patterns on the Martian surface, we were looking at a pronounced absence of any patterns at some sites,” Andrew Leier of the University of Calgary, Canada, told physicsworld.com. “We had noticed similar features in desert settings on Earth and tried to understand how this distribution came about.” […]
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