Mars

Mars
By Skeeter Wesinger
October 19, 2025

In the photograph, a reddish cliff face rises out of a wind-scoured plain, the strata climbing diagonally across the frame like the pages of a tilted book. At its center, a dark rectangular recess interrupts the rhythm—a void whose walls drop almost perfectly vertical, so clean they seem carved. The geometry jars against the slanting erosion that surrounds it. It looks like a doorway, but it is something subtler: the record of two ancient forces meeting at right angles.

The angled beds tell the story of sediment settling in a different age, each layer a quiet deposit of dust or silt hardened by time. Long after those layers were set, internal stresses fractured the rock, opening vertical joints through the mass. When the wind came, armed with its endless cargo of sand, it abraded the soft laminae along the bedding planes while also widening the fractures. Eventually, at one of those intersections, a single block detached—a neat, rectangular absence born of simple physics.

Professor Ron Lyons used to pause at outcrops like this and trace his hand along the stone. “Erosion isn’t chaos,” he’d say. “It’s the handwriting of structure.” He taught that every slope and shadow has a grammar: bedding dictating rhythm, joints providing syntax, time composing the sentence. What appears deliberate is often just the rock yielding to those rules.

Seen in that light, the “doorway” in this image is not a mystery but a manuscript. The slanted lines and vertical void tell the same story written in two dialects of stone—deposition and fracture, order and stress. The illusion of architecture dissolves, leaving behind something grander: evidence of the planet’s quiet labor, and the enduring truth of Lyons’s lesson—that when form and force intersect, even nature writes in straight lines.

The Martian photograph captures that paradox perfectly. The angled erosion tells one history; the vertical recess, another. Together they create a scene that feels deliberate, almost architectural, even though it is entirely natural. It is a reminder that geology often mimics geometry—and that a careful eye, honed by years in the field, can see both the form and the forces that shaped it.

The Eye That Sees

Photo taken by the Mars Global Surveyor

I lingered on that image longer than I should have, tracing each line and shadow as if they might finally confess intent. The opening stood there in quiet defiance, its vertical symmetry cutting through tilted beds like a thought interrupting memory. Below it stretched a pale bench of stone, smoothed by time until it looked almost paved—a terrace where the wind might pause to rest. And to the right, half-buried in shadow, the likeness of a turtle’s jaw cupped a single round geode, the size of a bowling ball. The sphere fit so perfectly in the hollow that it seemed placed there, the mineral heart cradled in a stony mouth.

Coincidence, of course. Yet it was the kind of coincidence that stops the rational mind cold. Professor Lyons used to warn against dismissing such moments too quickly. “Nature,” he’d say, “has a way of rehearsing intention.” His point wasn’t mystical—it was observational. Given enough time, a pattern emerges from chance, and chance carves a pattern in return. The geode had grown in darkness, its concentric layers forming in a quiet chemical patience; the cavity that held it had been shaped by wind, fracture, and the long attrition of dust. Two independent stories that happened, by grace or gravity, to end in the same frame.

Standing before a scene like that—even in a photograph from another world—you begin to understand why geologists so often speak like poets. The land writes in structure and syntax, and every so often it composes a line that feels intentional. The “doorway,” the “walkway,” the “turtle jaw”—these are our names for those brief alignments between the mind’s geometry and the planet’s indifference. They’re not evidence of design, only echoes of recognition.

Lyons used to trace his hand across such shapes and say, “Don’t worship the form. Read the process.” I think of that often now. The Mars photograph, for all its haunting symmetry, is not an artifact but a sentence: a statement written in bedding and fracture, in stress and repose. The rectangular recess and the curved geode are both parts of the same grammar—the meeting of right angles and circles, force and resistance, accident and alignment.

And that may be the real story here. We study rocks to understand time, but sometimes, they look back at us in perfect composition, as if time itself were trying to understand us.