{"id":943159,"date":"2026-10-23T09:18:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T09:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/943159\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T09:18:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T09:18:11","slug":"the-exotic-physics-behind-a-mysterious-1000-mile-cloud-on-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/943159\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018Exotic Physics\u2019 Behind a Mysterious 1,000-Mile Cloud on Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every morning during the Martian spring and summer, a thin and extremely long cloud emerges, only to disappear again. The wispy formation appears<\/a> near the volcano Arsia Mons and gradually elongates until it reaches over 1,000 miles\u2014about the distance from New York to Kansas City as the crow flies\u2014before dissipating. This cycle then repeats for several months.<\/p>\n

Since it was first recorded by a probe<\/a> in 2018, scientists have been unable to find a plausible explanation for the existence of this cloud, often referred to as the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC). Until now. Recently, researchers successfully modeled<\/a> the cloud\u2019s formation for the first time, their results suggesting that it may be driven by a physical process that has never been directly observed in any planet’s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

“We found that we needed to include some exotic physics \u2026 physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature. It certainly hasn\u2019t been seen in action before,” Jorge Hern\u00e1ndez-Bernal, a planetary scientist at Paris\u2019 Sorbonne Universit\u00e9 and lead author of the study, said in a press release<\/a>. “Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Earth, clouds usually form when water vapor creates droplets or ice crystals in the presence of tiny particles, such as dust or salt. The new study, published in Nature Geoscience<\/a>, instead suggests AMEC could be forming through so-called homogeneous nucleation, where vapor changes directly into ice crystals on its own without any help from debris.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s akin to droplets of condensation appearing in the middle of a room, rather than on a window,” Hern\u00e1ndez-Bernal explained. \u201cIt\u2019s wholly unexpected.\u201d<\/p>\n

This phenomenon requires extreme conditions\u2014a sharp temperature drop of 30 degrees Celsius within 10 minutes and high relative humidity. The Arsia Mons volcano also plays a key role. When wind current hits the 65,000-foot-tall volcano<\/a>, it creates a powerful wave that launches moist air high in the atmosphere in a matter of minutes.<\/p>\n

Scientists have assumed a similar phenomenon could occur in the upper atmospheres of other planets, including Venus and even Earth, but it has never been observed<\/a>. That\u2019s not too surprising given the extreme air humidity required for this phenomenon, which is more than 100,000 times greater than any value measured on Earth.<\/p>\n

Before this modeling, it was not known that these humidity levels existed on Mars<\/a> either. \u201cWe don\u2019t have nearly as much information about Mars\u2019 atmosphere<\/a> as we do about Earth’s, so reproducing the AMEC to this degree is a big success,\u201d said Hern\u00e1ndez-Bernal, adding, \u201cthe result is remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story originally appeared on WIRED Czech Republic and Slovakia<\/a> and has been translated from Czech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every morning during the Martian spring and summer, a thin and extremely long cloud emerges, only to disappear…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":943160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[800,18434,49,48,71721,1845,314,797,66,306,12449,179440],"class_list":["post-943159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-astronomy","tag-atmosphere","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-clouds","tag-mars","tag-physics","tag-planets","tag-science","tag-space","tag-theoretical-physics","tag-water-on-mars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/943160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}