Boiling water turns sand into hovercraft

• Autores: John Wenz
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3150, 2017, pág. 10
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The sand on Mars may be floating on air. Warm temperatures in the Martian summer, combined with a thin atmosphere and deposits of ice may cause sand to levitate and carve out deep gullies. Mars can get quite balmy in the summer, reaching temperatures up to 20°C. That's warm enough to melt some of the ice deposits scattered across the planet. But because Mars has just one-hundredth the atmospheric pressure of Earth, that water doesn't stay liquid for long on the surface before boiling away. Jan Raack at The Open University in the UK and his colleagues found that the pockets of water vapor can lift sediment into the air and move it across the ground