Pluto’s Bladed Terrain
During its 2015 flyby of Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured images of the dwarf planet’s bladed terrain, littered with gigantic shards of methane ice the size of skyscrapers. Astoundingly, the tallest of these structures reach 1,600 feet (500 meters) tall. A similar formation, called penitentes, is seen on Earth at a vastly smaller scale. Planetary scientists theorize that, millions of years ago, methane froze at Pluto’s high elevations and has been slowly evaporating into gas over time, in a rather unique form of erosion. Jupiter’s moon Europa exhibits similar features, the tallest of which measure five stories high.
