Look at the photo above. Doesn’t it look like rolling hills adorned with patches of trees? Well, it’s not. That’s a picture of Mars taken by the HiRISE, the most powerful camera sent to another planet, and the tree looking things are really just illusions. NASA says that they are just trails of debris left over from ice melt landslides and we can probably believe the agency.
The location pictured is located less than 240 miles from the planet’s north pole and actually show show sand dunes coated with a layer of thing dry ice. NASA’s Candy Hansen told The Sun: “The streaks are sand, dislodged as ice evaporates, which slide down the dune. At this time of the Martian year the whole scene is covered by CO2 frost.”
So don’t believe what you’ll likely read in while checking out at the supermarket. There are no trees (or related wildlife) living on Mars.