The Red Planet and its possible inhabitants have long fascinated us, but Despite their best efforts international space programs have found no evidence that life has ever been present on our neighboring planet.

However, there are many mysteries scattered across Mars that our planet’s scientists are still keen to unravel, with many of these helping to conclusively prove whether life ever could have, or did, exist on Mars.

And with this in mind, Dr Lonneke Roelofs from Utrecht University determined to understand whether mysterious dune gullies on the surface of the Red Planet were the result of interaction with any living organisms.

But as it turned out, these gullies were the result of something so different that Roelofs had to travel to a specialist research facility in the UK to truly comprehend it.

In her research paper, which was recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Roelofs explained that these gullies were formed as a result of interactions between sand dunes and CO2 ice.

As Roelofs explained in a statement, Martian winters reach low temperatures of minus 120 degrees Celsius, causing CO2 ice to form. Then, when the sand dunes heat up in the summer, the ice turns to gas and explodes, causing the gullies:

“In our simulation, I saw how this high gas pressure blasts away the sand around the block in all directions. However, the sublimation process continues, and so the sand keeps on being blasted in all directions.”

These gullies, Roelofs explained, looked very different to gullies in crater walls on Mars, due to the entirely different processes that formed them.

And it was this process that Roelofs modelled using The Open University’s ‘Mars chamber’, the only place on Earth where the conditions in which these gullies are formed could be reliably recreated:

“We tried out various things by simulating a dune slope at different angles of steepness. We let a block of CO2 ice fall from the top of the slope and observed what happened. After finding the right slope, we finally saw results. The CO2 ice block began to dig into the slope and move downwards just like a burrowing mole or the sandworms from Dune. It looked very strange!”

Sure it might not be the evidence of Martians that people around the world are still hoping for, but at a time when space programs are planning Mars missions, this experiment shows how starkly different conditions on Mars are.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about why we should be worried about the leak in the bottom of the ocean.