The spider and the snakeskin

Look closer

Pluto’s landscape includes radiating fractures nicknamed a spider and strongly textured terrain compared with snakeskin. Elsewhere, bright material caps mountain peaks.

Follow the evidence

These are separate locations grouped to explore how descriptive nicknames guide attention. A resemblance is a starting point for examining fractures, texture and deposits, rather than an explanation by itself.

A methane landscape records a climate history

Tanguy Bertrand and colleagues modelled methane and nitrogen transport across Pluto over long orbital cycles. Depending on assumed methane-ice brightness, their simulations accumulate persistent deposits at the latitudes of the bladed terrain or at mid-latitudes. This supports testing whether today’s ridged landscape is an eroded remnant of a much larger methane reservoir. The outcome depends on material properties and climate feedbacks; the model does not uniquely date the blades or explain the separate spider fractures. Spectral identification, relief and simulated ice transport remain different parts of the argument.

Two viewpoints turn texture into relief

The stereo product uses two camera positions separated by about fourteen minutes. With red–cyan glasses, ridges emerge above the broader rounded highlands and their intervening valleys. Without glasses, compare the shadowed blade outlines with the extended-colour photograph. The coloured edges encode viewpoint differences rather than surface chemistry, and the pairing is not a time-lapse of growing ice. This relief experiment helps test a formation idea; it does not by itself choose the material or date when erosion occurred.

Snowy-looking peaks can form without clouds

Bertrand’s team used a three-dimensional climate model to investigate the bright mountain caps. In their account, methane-rich gas at higher altitude can condense directly onto cold peaks, without the rising moist air and cloud snowfall familiar on Earth. The compositional inset helps identify methane ice; it does not photograph the condensation process. A similar-looking landscape can therefore emerge from very different atmospheric conditions. The explanation remains a model tied to the observed distribution of frost.

Sources & further reading

• The Icy Spider on Pluto — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
• Snakeskin Terrain — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
• Methane Snow on Pluto Peaks — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
• The CH4 cycles on Pluto over seasonal and astronomical timescales — Bertrand and colleagues — Original author research paper
• Pluto’s bladed terrain in 3-D — original photographic stereo product — NASA / New Horizons mission
• Why Pluto’s mountain frost forms differently from Earth’s — Bertrand team research account — NASA Ames / original research-team account