This new discovery comes from Mars itself, as NASA recently captured what appears to be yet another encounter with the strange Martian cloud. As the title suggests, this massive cloud emerged from Mars, directly above the Aria Mons volcano.
Many people thought the cloud was caused by the volcano erupting, but this hypothesis was quickly debunked when geologists revealed that the volcano had not been active in over 50 million years. Because it is likewise composed of water ice, the volcano is ruled out as a possible source of this cloud.
As a result of this bizarre encounter, it became known as the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud, and the team of experts studying it again labeled it as unexplained and unknown.
This phenomenon, according to Jorge Hernandez-Bernal, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Basque Country, has been going on for quite some time, and experts are all salivating at the prospect of figuring out what is causing it all to form in the first place.
So far, they’ve discovered that it reforms every year or so, and that it grows for about 80 days before dissipating in less than three hours. During its peak in 2018, around late September, the cloud covered nearly 1,500km of the planet’s surface, and it began to fade away after 80 days, around mid-October or so. It was discovered by the Mars Express, but no one knows what the reasoning is behind it all.
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