Mars is an incredible place. It's too easy to think that this is a cold, dry and lifeless desert, but this is not entirely true - there is an atmosphere, albeit subtle, seasons, although not as pronounced as ours, and there is also weather there.
The high resolution camera aboard the orbiting Mars explorer offers a fantastic view of the changes taking place on the planet. It turns out that sometimes the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is at the right time in the right place and shoots truly mesmerizing phenomena - for example, such as this sand tornado ("sand demon") towering over the terrain.
Sand demons are small whirlwinds, not as powerful as tornadoes on Earth, but having the same nature. The sun heats up the surface of the desert, and warm air begins to rise. If at this moment a cold wind blows at a certain height, it, like waves, begins to break against the columns of warm air, spiraling upward. Deserts on Earth also have similar phenomena, usually up to hundreds of meters high. But the devil in the picture, judging by the length of the shadow, is 800 meters!
The devil is relatively vertical - up to a height of 250 meters. Then the wind blowing at this height begins to bend the tail of the tornado in every possible way, turning it into a snake. The path the demon takes on the surface is almost straight.
Interestingly, the demon's footprints on the surface are light, not dark. The fact is that on the heavy, caked dust there is a layer of light, which is raised by a vortex and pulls it along, leaving a light path. Demons are most common in the spring. And even though we have such on Earth, it would be very interesting for me to be in the place of one of my descendants, who in a good spacesuit on the surface would see above themselves such an impressive tall tail of the sand demon Mars.
