It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas – on Mars. Much of the otherworldly landscape has a distinct red hue, but recent images show unusual frosty features that have turned the Red Planet’s south pole white.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter has captured stunning views of a winter wonderland on Mars, but this is no ordinary snowfall. Instead, according to ESA, Mars’ south pole is covered in layers of carbon dioxide ice and dust, creating the fascinating scene in the planet’s southern region, Australe Scopuli.

In winter on Mars, temperatures drop to as low as -123 degrees Celsius. As cold as it is, Mars doesn’t get more than a few meters of snow. Unlike snow on Earth, Martian snow comes in two flavors: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. On the one hand, due to the planet’s thin atmosphere, water ice turns into gas before it touches the surface. Dry ice, on the other hand, reaches the surface.

Although it looks like a winter wonderland, the images were taken in June, when it was almost summer at Mars’ south pole. According to an ESA statement, the warming rays of the sun are causing seasonal ice layers to begin to retreat, which can be seen on the left side of the image, where dark patches appear.

When sunlight shines through the translucent top layers of dry ice, the ice at the bottom sublimes—turning directly from the solid state into vapor—and creates pockets of trapped gas. The pressure builds until the layers of ice on the top begin to crack and jets of gas rush through the surface, carrying dark dust from below. After the dust breaks through, it falls back to the surface in a fan shape, controlled by the wind.

In the above view of Australe Scopuli’s seasonal ice caps, layers of ice and dust overlap in a swirling dream on the surface of Mars. The image was captured by the high-resolution stereo camera on Mars Express so that the topography of the landscape could be derived from the digital terrain model. The image offers a closer look at the fan-shaped pattern created by the dust bursts, forming boundaries between the layered deposits.

ESA’s Mars Express launched in 2003 and has been providing breathtaking images of the Martian landscape for more than 20 years. According to ESA, the spacecraft created the most comprehensive map of the chemical composition of Mars’ atmosphere, observed the planetary moons Phobos and Deimos in detail, and traced the history of water on Mars. The mission also had a lander called Beagle 2 on board, but it was lost upon arrival and never conducted scientific operations on the Red (or apparently White) Planet.