Beautiful Images of a Changing Mars Landscape Captured by NASA's Curiosity

Since last year, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has been moving through a zone that connects an area rich in clay to one that is rich in a saline mineral known as sulfate. The transition zone is proving to be equally as scientifically exciting as the clay-rich and sulfate-rich regions, which the science team focused on for the information they may each provide about Mars' wet history. In fact, this transition might serve as a record of a significant change in Mars' climate that occurred billions of years ago and that researchers are only now beginning to grasp. At one time, lakes and streams swept across Gale Crater, depositing material at the base of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall peak whose foothills Curiosity has been climbing since 2014. At that time, the clay minerals developed. Curiosity's observations in the transition zone higher up the mountain reveal that the streams reduced to trickles and sand dunes developed over the lake deposits. According to Ashwin Vasavada, the project scientist for Curiosity at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, "We no longer see the lake deposits that we saw for years down on Mount Sharp." Instead, there is a ton of evidence for drier conditions, such as arid dunes with sporadic stream crossings. That is a significant shift from the lakes that existed probably millions of years ago. Less clay and more sulfate are being found by the rover as it passes upward into the transition zone. Soon, Curiosity will drill the final rock sample it will take in this region, offering a more thorough look at the shifting mineral makeup of these rocks. This region also stands out for its distinctive geologic characteristics. The hills in the area probably started out as enormous, wind-swept sand dunes in a dry climate, eventually solidifying into granite. Other sediments transported by water and maybe deposited in ponds or little streams that formerly meandered amid the dunes are scattered among the fragments of these dunes. These sediments now resemble flaky layer stacks that are resistant to erosion, such as one known as "The Prow." The information that groundwater fluctuated over time across several eras makes the tale more interesting but also more challenging, creating a tangle of jigsaw pieces for Curiosity's scientists to fit together into a precise timeframe.

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