For two decades, a European spacecraft has silently orbited Mars, capturing glimpses of a world that looks still—but hides a chaotic, invisible rhythm in its skies. Now, that rhythm has been decoded.
In the most ambitious study of its kind, researchers have mapped the planet’s atmospheric waves on a global scale—rippling patterns of air that, until now, were poorly understood. The results? Startling. The Martian atmosphere behaves in ways that are more unstable, more asymmetric, and more extreme than scientists ever imagined.
Led by Francisco Brasil and Pedro Machado of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, the team analyzed 20 years of data from ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. Their findings, just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, offer the most complete look yet at a hidden force shaping Martian climate: atmospheric gravity waves.
If you’ve ever watched ripples spread across a pond after tossing a stone, you already understand the basic idea. On Mars, these “ripples” happen in the atmosphere. Gravity waves form when air is pushed upward by mountains, dust storms, or changes in surface temperature—and gravity pulls it back down, creating oscillations.
But while Earth’s atmosphere has water vapor and thick air to dampen or redirect these waves, Mars has no such buffer. Its thin atmosphere allows these waves to spread freely—and violently.
That means gravity waves play an outsized role in everything from local weather to planet-wide dust storms. And as this new study shows, they don’t behave the same way everywhere.
The Planet Is Lopsided—And That Changes Everything
After reviewing 263 wave patterns and conducting deep analysis on 125 of them, the research team discovered a shocking imbalance: the Martian climate behaves very differently in the northern and southern hemispheres.
This kind of asymmetry wasn’t expected. It suggests one half of the planet reacts to atmospheric energy, like heat, dust, or terrain, differently than the other. In short, Mars has a bipolar climate disorder, and we’re only now beginning to understand why.
The waves themselves come in three main types:
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Dry ice waves, driven by carbon dioxide frost sublimating from the surface.
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Water-based waves, rare due to Mars’ low humidity but still detectable.
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Dust storm waves, massive structures that move energy across regions.
The analysis also suggests that the southern hemisphere may be more prone to extreme wave events—something that could have serious implications for future missions or robotic landers.
One of the biggest challenges? Finding waves at all.
The OMEGA instrument on Mars Express collected hundreds of thousands of images—but Martian clouds are rare, and wave activity is often invisible. The researchers had to hunt through years of data, manually identifying wave patterns when thin clouds or atmospheric disturbances made them visible.
But their persistence paid off. What started as scattered observations became a coherent global pattern. And more importantly—it opened the door to what might come next.
“The differences between Mars and Earth are even greater than we thought. There is more asymmetry between the southern and northern hemispheres than previously believed,” explains Pedro Machado.
