{"id":223421,"date":"2025-10-15T03:14:21","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T08:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/mysterious-gullies-on-mars-appear-to-have-been-carved-by-burrowing-co%e2%82%82-ice-blocks"},"modified":"2025-10-15T03:14:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T08:14:21","slug":"mysterious-gullies-on-mars-appear-to-have-been-carved-by-burrowing-co%e2%82%82-ice-blocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/mysterious-gullies-on-mars-appear-to-have-been-carved-by-burrowing-co%e2%82%82-ice-blocks","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious gullies on Mars appear to have been carved by burrowing CO\u2082 ice blocks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mysterious-gullies-on-mars-appear-to-have-been-carved-by-burrowing-coe28282-ice-blocks.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Did life really exist on Mars after all? Unfortunately, there is no conclusive evidence for this yet. Nevertheless, it would seem that some form of life was the driving force behind the mysterious Martian dune gullies. Earth scientist Dr. Lonneke Roelofs from Utrecht University has investigated how these gullies were formed. In a test setup, she observed that blocks of CO<sub>2<\/sub> ice \u201cdug\u201d these gullies in a unique way.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt felt like I was watching the sandworms in the film Dune,\u201d Roelofs says. Her findings are <a href=\"https:\/\/agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1029\/2024GL112860\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in Geophysical Research Letters.<\/p>\n<p>Other researchers had previously suspected that these blocks could play a role in the formation of the gullies. Roelofs has now proven this by having CO<sub>2<\/sub> ice blocks actually dig those gullies in an experiment\u2014a phenomenon that we do not know here on Earth and that had never been observed by anyone before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did life really exist on Mars after all? Unfortunately, there is no conclusive evidence for this yet. Nevertheless, it would seem that some form of life was the driving force behind the mysterious Martian dune gullies. Earth scientist Dr. Lonneke Roelofs from Utrecht University has investigated how these gullies were formed. In a test setup, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}