DECODED: Mystery behind Pluto’s ‘bladed terrain’

The mysterious “bladed terrain” of Pluto is made almost entirely of methane ice, and likely formed as a kind of erosion that wore away the planet’s surfaces, leaving dramatic crests and sharp divides, scientists say. NASA’s New Horizons mission – which flew past Pluto in July 2015 – discovered the strange formations resembling giant knife blades of ice, whose origin had remained a mystery.

These jagged geological ridges are found at the highest altitudes on Pluto’s surface, near its equator, and can soar many hundreds of feet into the sky as high as a New York City skyscraper. They are one of the most puzzling feature types on Pluto, and it now appears the blades are related to Pluto’s complex climate and geological history. A team led by Jeffrey Moore, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in the US has determined that formation of the bladed terrain begins with methane freezing out of the atmosphere at extreme altitudes on Pluto, in the same way frost freezes on the ground on Earth, or even in your freezer.

“When we realized that bladed terrain consists of tall deposits of methane ice, we asked ourselves why it forms all of these ridges, as …read more