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takyon writes:

Pluto has a unique (and slow) climate cycle:

A new study of Pluto's bizarre "bladed terrain", which stretches as high as skyscrapers on Earth, has identified them as being composed largely of methane ice, formed through erosion caused by long-term changes in the dwarf planet's climate.

Discovered by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its July 2015 Pluto flyby, the bladed terrain, which resembles huge "knife blades" pointing up, has mystified scientists, who could not explain the formation's origin.

For the group of researchers led by New Horizons team member Jeffrey Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center in California, the first clue about the terrain's origin is that it is located at the highest altitudes on Pluto's surface in regions near the equator. At these high altitudes, methane can freeze out of the atmosphere and fall to the ground as snow. Like Earth, Pluto has a hydrologic cycle of evaporation and condensation, but one that uses methane instead of water.

That hydrologic cycle has driven the formation of its bladed terrains and giant ridges. "When we realized that bladed terrain consists of tall deposits of methane ice, we asked ourselves why it forms all of these ridges, as opposed to just being big blobs of ice on the ground," Moore said. "It turns out that Pluto undergoes climate variation[,] and[,] sometimes, when Pluto is a little warmer, the methane ice begins to basically 'evaporate' away."

Original Submission