New form of lava flow discovered on Mars

HIGH-RESOLUTION photos of lava flows on Mars reveal coiling spiral patterns that resemble snail or nautilus shells. Such patterns have been found in a few locations on Earth, but never before on Mars. The discovery, made by Arizona State University (ASU), United States, graduate student Andrew Ryan, is announced in a paper published April 27, 2012, in the scientific journal Science.The new result came out of research into possible interactions of lava flows and floods of water in the Elysium volcanic province of Mars.'I was interested in Martian outflow channels and was particularly intrigued by Athabasca Valles and Cerberus Palus, both part of Elysium,' says Ryan, who is in his first year as a graduate student in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Philip Christensen, Regents' Professor of Geological Sciences at ASU, is second author on the paper.'Athabasca Valles has a very interesting history,' Ryan says.'There's an extensive literature on the area, as well as an intriguing combination of seemingly fluvial and volcanic features.'Among the features are large slabs or plates that resemble broken floes of pack ice in the Arctic Ocean on Earth. In the past, a few scientists have argued that the plates in Elysium are in fact underlain by water ice.Assessing those claims that ice was present today beneath the lava plates drove Ryan to study the area. 'My initial goal,' he says, 'was to model the nighttime infrared temperatures of the plates. Then I became fascinated by the terrain lying between the plates and the high-centered polygonal patterns found there.' This led him to look closely at every available image of the region.
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