Pat Flannery wrote:

Diane Wilson wrote:

Flatter, and weirder, too. Steve Squyres says he won't even
attempt an analysis yet; he's never seen anything like it.


If you didn't know better, you'd say that that place dried up yesterday,
given what the soil looks like close up.
What the hell is this all about? Wind-blown soil shouldn't make patterns
that small and hard-edged, by a long shot...

Yup ... been to places like that, including Nambung National Park in
West Australia [1]. In fact, when I saw that first photo from MER-2 of
the close-up of the ground, it instantly struck me that that's what it
resembled. You might find coarse particulates, about 1cm to 5cm just
under the dust, all jumbled up, and then fine dust on top in rippled
patterns caused by wind (and very little else - even in Nambung it
doesn't rain an awful lot).

Mind you, in the case of Nambung (famous for its 'pinnacles') it was
formed by tree roots causing a change in the ground chemistry, which
after the trees vanished caused uneven erosion patterns including short
limestone rod-like formations (between 3 and 10cm long) which are the
reason for the weird patterns on the surface. With Mars, it would be an
entirely different particulate generating method, but the results look
strikingly similar.

Unless there were once trees on Mars and that white rocky outcrop is limestone...


[1] For more info, go to:
http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/surf...ed/Nambung.jpg - this is
my own photo of the soil, the foreground is about 50cm across

Otherwise:
http://www.calm.wa.gov.au/national_p...h/nambung.html
http://www.alexbond.com.au/mattedpri...docs/mp32.html


David
--
per aspera ad astra