Something is alive on Pluto. Even though this distant world is so cold that nitrogen freezes into ice, scientists have just discovered that massive landslides are sliding down its surface — and they are big enough to bury a small city.
A team of planetary scientists found six enormous landslides hiding in three craters on Pluto. The discovery, published in the journal Icarus, came from studying images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during a flyby in July 2015. The spacecraft captured Pluto's surface in remarkable detail — about 300 meters (roughly the length of three football fields) per pixel.
The researchers, led by Marco Emanuele Discenza and colleagues, paired those images with elevation maps collected during the flyby. What they saw looked strikingly familiar: crescent-shaped scars at the tops of crater walls, giant blocks of ice that had moved from their original position, and long trails of debris spread across crater floors. It looked exactly like landslides on Earth.
But these are not small events. The landslides plunged between 1.5 and 2.2 kilometers (about 1 mile) straight down before sliding up to 14.5 kilometers (9 miles) across the frozen ground. The largest single landslide covered roughly 130 square kilometers — an area big enough to completely bury a city like Manhattan.
This is the first time scientists have found clear evidence of landslides on one of the most important icy worlds in our solar system. Pluto sits in a region called the Kuiper Belt, a vast ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. Until now, no one had detected landslides there, even though Pluto has steep crater walls and rough, icy terrain where you might expect them.
The discovery tells scientists something important: Pluto is not a dead, frozen rock. It is a geologically active world, meaning something is causing its surface to change and move. The researchers noted that these landslides may have helped shape and sculpt the landscape over time, and similar events could be happening across other icy bodies in that distant region.
There are likely more landslides waiting to be found. The team spotted hints of additional slides in the craters they studied, but the images are not sharp enough to confirm them. Future missions with better cameras and more detailed topographic data could reveal many more of these frozen avalanches scattered across Pluto's surface.
So next time you look up at the night sky, remember: even in the cold, dark outskirts of our solar system, worlds are still on the move.