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Planetary scientists from Rice University, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the California Institute of Technology have answers to a mystery that has baffled the Mars research community since NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered a mineral called tridymite in Gale Crater in 2016. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took this low-angle self-portrait at the location where it drilled rock on July 30, 2015, producing a powder (seen in the foreground) that was later confirmed to contain the rare mineral tridymite. (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) Tridymite is a very rare form of high-temperature, low-pressure quartz on Earth, and it’s not immediately clear how the concentrated chunks ended up in craters. Gale Crater was chosen as Curiosity’s landing site because of the possibility that it once harbored liquid water, and Curiosity found evidence confirming Gale Crater was a lake as recently as 1 billion years ago. “The discovery of tridymite in mudstone at Gale Crater is one of the most surpri

Many people are familiar with the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, but what is less known is that occasionally, the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere above the Arctic also disintegrates, depleting the ozone layer there. This last happened in the spring months of 2020, and before that, in the spring of 2011. Whenever the ozone layer is depleted, climate scientists then observe weather anomalies throughout the northern hemisphere. In central and northern Europe, Russia and especially in Siberia, spring is very warm and dry. In other areas, such as the polar regions, however, wet conditions prevail. This weather anomaly is especially noticeable in 2020. Switzerland is also unusually warm and dry that spring. Whether there is a causal relationship between the destruction of stratospheric ozone and the observed weather anomalies is a matter of debate in climate research. Polar eddies in the stratosphere, which form in winter and decay in spring, also play a role. Sci