--- title: Cosmic Old Faithful: Are There Geysers on Mars? description: Artist rendering by Ron Miller/JPL/Arizona State University The rule for space aesthetics has always been clear: First comes the science, then comes the art. You... canonical: https://time.com/archive/7219587/cosmic-old-faithful-are-there-geysers-on-mars/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-10-09T12:02:53.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-25T05:45:44.713Z article:section: Science og:title: Cosmic Old Faithful: Are There Geysers on Mars? og:description: Artist rendering by Ron Miller/JPL/Arizona State University The rule for space aesthetics has always been clear: First comes the science, then comes the art. You... og:url: https://time.com/archive/7219587/cosmic-old-faithful-are-there-geysers-on-mars/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1e5e197decb8990e/6998b5f407a30db41b77b241/600_esp_016423_2640_rgb-nomap_crop_rev4_bigger2.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 600 og:image:height: 338 og:image:alt: 600_ESP_016423_2640_RGB.NOMAP_crop_rev4_bigger2 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Cosmic Old Faithful: Are There Geysers on Mars? twitter:description: Artist rendering by Ron Miller/JPL/Arizona State University The rule for space aesthetics has always been clear: First comes the science, then comes the art. You... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1e5e197decb8990e/6998b5f407a30db41b77b241/600_esp_016423_2640_rgb-nomap_crop_rev4_bigger2.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Science](/section/science/) # Cosmic Old Faithful: Are There Geysers on Mars? by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Oct 9, 2012 12:02 PM UTC  Avalanche in the northern polar region of Mars. On the left the avalanche creates a 180-foot-high dust cloud after falling nearly 2,000 feet from the scarp edge. To the right, black markings on frozen dunes give indications of a partial defrost. Photographed from an altitude of about 200 miles, the clarity of this view gives a clear indication of the spacecraft telescope’s power. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, January 27, 2010 Avalanche in the northern polar region of Mars. On the left the avalanche creates a 180-foot-high dust cloud after falling nearly 2,000 feet from the scarp edge. To the right, black markings on frozen dunes give indications of a partial defrost. Photographed from an altitude of about 200 miles, the clarity of this view gives a clear indication of the spacecraft telescope’s power. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, January 27, 2010NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/M—(c) Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Oct 9, 2012 12:02 PM UTC  A candid talk about my weight helped make it less taboo “I don’t want you to freak out,” my mother told me one morning when I was 12, “but I think you may have put on a little bit of weight.”rnrnPick your jaw up from the floor and put away your pitchfork, because this nugget of real talk was one of the best things my mother ever did. Horrified relatives said I would need years of therapy to forgive my mother for "fat-shaming" me into anorexia, that I would eventually turn to drugs and cutting to heal my crippled psyche before I succumbed to a life of crime. None of these things happened. Instead, I have a good relationship with my body and my mother, partly because she told me when I was getting a little plump.rnrn"It's only 3 or 4 pounds, and it's not the end of the world," she said. "It happens to everyone. I'll help you figure it out."a2014/02/alter\_0011.jpg" width="700" height="505" />rnIllustration by Charlotte AlterrnThe conversation around young girls and weight is so fraught that many mothers avoid having it altogether, or opt for gauzy platitudes about unconditional love. But girls aren't stupid, and tip-toeing around the body talk just reinforces the idea that weight is some kind of all-powerful force to be reckoned with, A-Thing-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. My mother decided to name the demon and teach me how to deal with it, which demystified the weight loss process and made it a lot less scary.rnrn“If your hair was unruly, or if you had missed a button and your shirt was lopsided, I would have told you,” she told me when I asked her about it for this piece. “It’s the same thing.”rnrnIn the wake of dozens of "Real Beauty" ad campaigns, and billions of adolescent selfies, everyone's talking about mothers, daughters, and body image. On Wednesday's installment of the TODAY Show’s new “Love Your Selfie” campaign, Cameron Diaz and Maria Shriver gathered together moms and girls to discuss how their self-confidence affects one another. “I was taught always from day one that beauty comes from within,” said one of the girls, echoing the schmaltziness that usually surrounds this topic.rnrnNumerous studies have shown that mothers influence their daughters’ self image more than the media does, and some scientists recommend that mothers nix body talk entirely; Dr. Leslie Sim of the Mayo Clinic told USA Today that she recommends "zero talk about dieting, zero talk about weight." Diaz was urging women to talk more openly about the science of healthy eating, but most people are still uncomfortable with candid discussions of a girl's actual weight. Just ask Dara-Lynn Weiss, who was practically tarred and feathered for putting her 7-year old on a diet and writing about it in Vogue.rnrnThe mystical amulets of “self-love” and “inner beauty” sound nice and progressive, but they're little comfort during a meltdown in the bathing suit store. And these ephemeral ideas leave girls stranded between two worlds, unsure whom to trust; their mothers who say they're perfect just the way they are, or a world that tells them otherwise. Eventually it becomes too exhausting to maintain total acceptance of the way we look, and the "self-love" gets drowned in a wave of self-doubt fueled by everything from the media to the kids at school.rnrnBody-image theorists are right that we as a society need to develop a greater acceptance of different body types, but my mother wasn't concerned with society, she was concerned with me: she noticed that I wasn't exercising, that my clothes weren't fitting me right, that I would come home depressed from school dances and look glumly in the mirror. Of course, no middle school girls likes to hear that they've gained weight, and I had a good 15-minute tantrum about when she told me, but at that age I would cry when Blockbuster was out of the Titanic VHS.rnrnSo after I pulled myself together, my mother and I devised a simple and easy plan: I would cut dessert for two weeks, and run two laps around a small park near our house every day. When I came back sweaty after my first run, she said, “It’s already working!” At the end of the week, she said “you’re looking so much healthier already,” and after the second week, she said “Congratulations! You did it!” The next time I asked her if I looked fat, she said I looked great. And I believed her.rnrnThat was the first of many candid conversations with my mother about my weight. She explained that it was much easier to lose 3 or 4 pounds than 10 or 15, and that she would tell me if I was getting bigger so I could make healthy changes before the situation got out of control. That made sense to me, and besides, the psychological effort to maintain a zen-like acceptance of my body was much harder than doing a few sit-ups now and then.rnrnSometimes I would ask her if I looked big, and sometimes she would tell me I was looking a little "zaftig" or "getting a butt." I wasn't thrilled to hear this, but it never sent me into a tailspin. Instead, it was like she had just tasked me with something mildly annoying but doable, like cleaning my room every day. It didn't feel like a condemnation, it felt like a reality check.rnrnMy mother's strategy might not work for everybody; I'm lucky that I have a medium build, a normal metabolism and am fortunate enough to have access to healthy food. But being frank about weight loss has helped me stay sane about my body even into adulthood. "Everyone has a basic weight equilibrium, sometimes you'll be above that, sometimes you'll be below that," she told me, "but the important thing is to not go nuts about it." Artist rendering by Ron Miller/JPL/Arizona State University The rule for space aesthetics has always been clear: First comes the science, then comes the art. You can’t take the most distant cosmic photographs ever captured unless you build and launch the [Hubble](http://topics.time.com/hubble/) [Space telescope](http://topics.time.com/space-telescope/) first. You can’t capture close-up shots of Neptune’s aquatic blue or Jupiter’s spin-painted atmosphere or Saturn’s braided rings until you get the Voyager spacecraft out to their neighborhood. (**Photos:** [Window on Infinity: Pictures from Space](http://science.time.com/2012/10/01/window-on-infinity-pictures-from-space-3)) Now that rule is being proven again with sensational images making the rounds on the Web — and soon to be published in the new book [Planetfall](http://www.amazon.com/Planetfall-New-Solar-System-Visions/dp/1419704222), by Michael Benson — that provide a cool and new and faintly eerie look at Mars. Benson is not a [NASA](http://topics.time.com/nasa/) engineer, much less an astronaut. What he is however is a photographer and media artist, one with an unusually sharp eye for images from the deep elsewhere that can dazzle terrestrial sensibilities like ours. (**More**: [Martian Blizzard: It’s Snowing on the Red Planet](http://science.time.com/2012/09/17/martian-blizzard-its-snowing-on-the-red-planet/)) The pictures doing the dazzling today were shot by the [Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)](http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/)in 2010 and show the predictable — if beautiful — rusty dunes of the Martian surface, sculpted like snowdrifts from the planet’s tenuous but persistent wind. The scene is broken up, however, buy strange, black, spidery blemishes scattered randomly about. From orbit they look tiny, but on the ground they’d be huge — surely larger than a football field. It’s partly their very ugliness that makes them eye-catching and partly the mystery of what causes them. Actually, however, that last part is likely no mystery at all — and the source of the features is one more indication of how complex a planet Mars is turning out to be. (**More**:[ Compelling New Evidence For Flowing Water on Mars](http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2086969,00.html)) While Mars can sometimes be an almost temperate place — at high noon in midsummer on the Martian equator, temperatures can reach or exceed 70º F (20º C) — at other times it can fall as low as -225º F (-153º C). This can have a dramatic effect on Mars’s two most important volatile substances: water and carbon dioxide. Last year, [MRO images revealed seasonal markings](http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2086969,00.html) on Martian slopes, with long, dark streaks appearing in the spring and summer and vanishing in the winter. The streaks emerge and retreat at cycles in the Martian year consistent with the freezing and thawing points of water, suggesting that subsurface ice deposits are intermittently melting and running and then retracting back into the soil as the thermometer falls. Said mission scientist Mike Myer at the time the finding was announced: --- > “” --- The spidery splatters in the current images show up seasonally too, but they’re too big to be slowly flowing water and their appearance doesn’t always coincide with temperatures within water’s freeze-thaw cycle. Instead, investigators theorized as long ago as 2006, in a[ paper in _Nature_](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16915284), that they could be carbon dioxide, which is present on Mars in much greater abundance than water and would not just seep to the surface, but erupt out of it, as the CO2 went suddenly from solid to gas. As the researchers wrote in the _Nature_ paper: --- > “” --- And how. With MRO still orbiting Mars and two active rovers on the surface, the data stream from the Red Planet will continue. It doesn’t take the likes of Benson to make those new discoveries. But we rely on him and other media artists all the same to help us see — and appreciate — the science like we never otherwise would. **(Photos:** [Snapshots of the Heavens: Amazing Astronomy Images](http://science.time.com/2012/09/19/amazing-astronomy-photos)) (**More**: [Martian Find: Evidence of an Ancient, Rushing Stream](http://science.time.com/2012/09/28/martian-find-evidence-of-an-ancient-rushing-stream/)) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7219587/cosmic-old-faithful-are-there-geysers-on-mars/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7219587/cosmic-old-faithful-are-there-geysers-on-mars/"},"headline":"Cosmic Old Faithful: Are There Geysers on Mars?","datePublished":"2012-10-09T12:02:53.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-25T05:45:44.713Z","description":"Artist rendering by Ron Miller/JPL/Arizona State University The rule for space aesthetics has always been clear: First comes the science, then comes the art. You...","url":"https://time.com/archive/7219587/cosmic-old-faithful-are-there-geysers-on-mars/","keywords":["NASA","Mars","Water"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1e5e197decb8990e/6998b5f407a30db41b77b241/600_esp_016423_2640_rgb-nomap_crop_rev4_bigger2.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"Science","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1e5e197decb8990e/6998b5f407a30db41b77b241/600_esp_016423_2640_rgb-nomap_crop_rev4_bigger2.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"600_ESP_016423_2640_RGB.NOMAP_crop_rev4_bigger2","caption":"Avalanche in the northern polar region of Mars. On the left the avalanche creates a 180-foot-high dust cloud after falling nearly 2,000 feet from the scarp edge. To the right, black markings on frozen dunes give indications of a partial defrost. Photogra","creditText":"NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/M—(c) Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/science/","name":"Science"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7219587/cosmic-old-faithful-are-there-geysers-on-mars/","name":"Cosmic Old Faithful: Are There Geysers on Mars?"}}]}] ```