Hundreds of black ‘spiders’ have been spotted in the mysterious Inca City on Mars in new satellite images.
A new picture of her European Space Agency (ESA) with “spiders” actually shows seasonal bursts of carbon dioxide gas on the Red Planet.
The dark, spiky formations were spotted in a formation known as the City of the Incas in the south polar region of Mars. Images taken by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express Orbiter and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter show dark dots with markings that look like spider legs.
In fact these dots are gas channels with a diameter of 45 meters to 1 kilometer. They occur when weather begins to warm in the southern hemisphere during the Martian Spring, melting layers of carbon dioxide ice. The heat causes the lower layers of ice to turn to gas or denature.
As the gas expands and riseserupts from the overlying ice sheetscarrying with it dark dust from the solid surface.
This dust erupts from the ice before falling onto the upper layer, creating the cracked, spidery pattern we see. In some places, the geysers erupt through ice up to 1 meter thick, according to the ESA.
The City of the Incas is also known as Angustus Labyrinthus. It gets its name from its linear, rugged ridges, which were once thought to be fossilized sand dunes or perhaps remnants of ancient Martian glaciers, which could have left behind high walls of sediment as they retreated.
In 2002 the Mars Orbiter revealed that the Inca city is part of a circular formation about 86 kilometers wide. This feature may be an old impact crater.
This fact which suggests that the geometric ridges may be magma that came to the surface through the cracked, heated crust of Mars after impact with a space rock.
The crater would then have been filled with sediments, which have since eroded, partially revealing magma formations reminiscent of ancient ruins.
