When we can’t look up, sometimes it’s easier to just look around or even down. Orbiters above Mars and rovers on Mars are making it possible for us to see the wind. And I’m not talking Disney lyrics here; we are not painting with all the colors of the wind or anything ear wormy like that. No, we are talking about how the flowing dunes on Mars’s surface allow us to see the direction the wind is pushing the sands of Mars, and when two dunes collide, it lets us see how the winds and dust are structured and mix. 

In a new study in the journal Geology, researcher Mackenzie Day looks specifically at the interaction of colliding dunes on Mars. According to the release on this work: In the Iapygia region of Mars, [wind altered dune] ridges incorporated both light and dark sands, leading to light-dark banding in the upwind side of the ridges. Banding occurring only on one side of the ridges suggests that the banding formed as the ridges migrated. Furthermore, the dune-interaction pattern known from Earth can be seen in some ridges where the banding is truncated and then reconnects, just like two dunes touching and then combining downwind. 

As a human, I find this work beautiful, and as a scientist, it’s cool to know that sand dunes tell us so much about what we currently can’t see.

More Information

GSA press release

“Interaction bounding surfaces exposed in migrating transverse aeolian ridges on Mars,” Mackenzie Day, 2021 September 30, Geology