This new discovery comes from the Red Planet itself, as NASA recently recorded what appears to be yet another encounter with the peculiar Martian cloud. As the title says, this gigantic cloud emerged from the Red Planet, directly above the Aria Mons volcano.
Many people thought the cloud was caused by the volcano erupting, but this hypothesis was immediately debunked when geologists stated that the volcano hadn’t been active in well 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.
According to Jorge Hernandez-Bernal, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Basque Country, this phenomena 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 know it reforms every year or so, and it grows for about 80 days before dissipating in less than three hours flat.
During its height in 2018, around late September, the cloud covered almost 1,500km of the planet’s surface, and after 80 days, it began to fade away 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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