Looks more like
the dust trail of a group of martian dune buggy racers to me. Possibly racing into a cave to hide from those pesky spy cameras from earth.
NASA has released a rather nice snap of a Martian "avalanche" - a cascade of ice and dust tumbling down a slope near the Red Planet's north pole captured by its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on 19 February: NASA image of Martian avalanche. Pic: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of …
So
If an avalanche happens on Mars but nobody is around to hear it does it make a sound?
Clearly we can expand the logic in this to suggest that our observation of Mars is clearly causing these avalanches.
I suggest to avoid such future issues we should be more sneaky in our observations and definitely don't use microphones.
Hopefully this way Mars wont realise that someone is around to see it and therefore it wont happen.
If you ask me i think its just showing off.
This is in fact a smoke bomb being set off by a brave hunting party of natives (menfromMars?) as they search and destroy the Nu Insect Overlards who are trying to colonize their red and pleasant* land. Vinceranno.
* It might just look like a lot of dry sand to Reg readers, but surely we can take it as read that every creature views where they live as home, and wishes to repel repellent invaders?
...I'm waiting for the day when NASA/ESA/JAXA/somebody is finally able to build a rover with enough computing power, storage, memory and bandwidth to record actual full-motion MPEGs of stuff like this. Those damn' stitched-together time-lapse animated GIFs of dust devils at Meridiani just aren't cutting it for me anymore.
Awesome foto, though, and seriously awesome luck to have caught something like this in the act, instead of just the evidence of it having happened beforehand. Suh-weet.