Dalmatian Terrain

An example of dalmatian terrain near the south pole. The bright material is polar ice and the dark spots dark sands that are appearing in depressions where the ice has defrosted to reveal underlying material. Interestingly, there is an almost continuous dark band around the edges of many of the depressions. This could be a clue to the nature of the sand deposits in polar regions. The sand forms dunes in a range of sizes and shapes. Near the top of the image the dunes shrink until they are smaller than the 18m pixels of the THEMIS camera and seem to disappear into the surrounding ice.