Pipes on Mars, called "glass worms" (9 photos)
Exploration of rovers and orbital stations gives us everything more evidence that Mars was alive about a billion years ago planet. There were deep rivers and lakes, perhaps even had time life was born, and not in a primitive form, but in a more complex, but some hope that intelligent beings even managed to live on Mars. 
Undoubtedly, what happened to Mars is a real tragedy, and the history of the red planet is very important to us, suddenly the same will it happen to the earth? Therefore, by studying our neighbor actively scientists are engaged, and Mars constantly presents us with various puzzle surprises. One of them is mysterious tunnels similar to pipes. 
The conversation about the mysterious tunnels began after the apparatus Mars Global Surveyor, launched by NASA in November 1996, began send your first photographs to Earth. For that time they were so high quality that the researchers even found traces of streams of water in deep gorges - traces of the dead were finally found rivers! However, several photographs alerted NASA experts: they strange structures similar to ribbed "pipes" with transparent, as if made of glass, walls, going to three different directions on a rocky surface. What is it? Metro former Martians? Tunnels left by civilization? Or unique relief feature? 
That very first photo from 1996
The photo, which got into the media, caused quite a stir. So, skeptics believed that this was a consequence of some so far unknown to us natural processes. But ufologists undoubtedly liked these shots: some thought it was something like alien corridors, tunnels or Metro; while others fantasized even more, and they announced that these are traces or remains of a giant monster - an ancient Martian worm. Let's try to figure out what it is all the same. 
In the view of the artist
The mysterious formations were photographed on a vast dark Acidalian plain with a diameter of about 3 thousand km. Dark color The Acidalian Plain is explained by the fact that it was once filled with water, perhaps in the past there was a huge lake in its place, or even ocean. The photographs of the "worms" show a ribbed structure, and their width from 40 to 170 meters, and in some places even reaches 200 meters. The length of the longest "pipe" is 50 km. 
Plain of Acidalia in the upper right corner of the map of Mars circled in yellow
In most cases, pipes are in recesses - in cracks. and crevices, but in some places they rise above the surface of the valley at 110 - 125 m. 
Older photographs show suspicious structures really resemble the spine of a giant creature, or what remains of an underground tunnel. But if we look at the latest photographs from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (NASA), then all hypotheses ufologists and science fiction writers about mysterious tunnels will dispel with a whiff of skepticism and deprivation of last hope - these are not mysterious creatures, and not moves, and not tunnels. 
The new photographs show that at the bottom of these cracks, the Martian the sand is still wet, dark blue, and the ribbed stripes are applied dry sand from the Martian plains by dust storms. Because the the valley itself is a lowland, and the cracks, respectively, are even deeper, then still subsurface water can rise to the top. 
Similar ribbed structures are found in other Martian lowlands, such as the Mariner Valleys: 
These "ribs" - like memories frozen in time - memories of when Mars was alive, when rushing waters traveled along winding channels, when the force of the current left its footprints at the bottom of the seas, rivers and oceans, just as we leave footprints on snow. But for some reason fate was unkindinclined towards Mars. None aliens, and probably not even bacteria left alive either. Only the wind distills the reddish-yellow sand, which knows no rest, and in its mournfully singing periodically performs a sad requiem, which echoes reflects off silent rocks and the tops of sand dunes in icy deserts.
