Categories
And Beyond The Infinite

Death from the skies!

Or… dust from the skies! I’m gonna go all Fred Baker on it and issue my very own…

Martian Tornado Warning

…because… check this out.

Martian Tornado

It’s a giant dust devil on Mars.

A towering dust devil, casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this image acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The scene is a late-spring afternoon in the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The view covers an area about four-tenths of a mile (644 meters) across. North is toward the top. The length of the dusty whirlwind’s shadow indicates that the dust plume reaches more than half a mile (800 meters) in height. The plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.

So… it’s giant Martian tornado*, in the late part of the Martian spring. People from Arkansas and Oklahoma should colonize this planet immediately (as I’m from Arkansas, I know of what I speak). We’d be right at home. Let’s land a few well-stocked trailers there and get going.

* maybe not a tornado formed from the same moisture-reliant convection structure that causes tornadoes in the American midwest, sure, but obviously there’s some kind of atmospheric shear making this happen – it’s the same root cause in the end.… Read more