It’s starting to feel like Christmas—on Mars. The otherworldly landscape is, in general, a distinct red color, but new images reveal unusual features of the cold that has turned the Red Planet’s south pole white.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter has captured incredible views of a winter wonderland on Mars, but it’s not your regular snowfall. However, the south pole of Mars is covered by layers of carbon dioxide ice and dust, according to ESAwhich creates the breathtaking view across the planet’s southern region of the Australe Scopuli.

During the winter on Mars, the temperature drops to -190 degrees Fahrenheit (-123 degrees Celsius). As cold as it gets, Mars doesn’t get more than a few feet of snow. Unlike snow on Earth, Martian snow has two flavors: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. On the one hand, water ice turns to gas before it touches the surface, due to the planet’s thin atmosphere; dry ice, on the other hand, reached the top.

Although it looks like a winter wonderland, the pictures were taken in June, when summer is approaching at the south pole of Mars. According to an ESA releasethe Sun’s warming rays cause the seasonal ice sheets to begin their retreat, seen on the left side of the image where the black patches are flowing.

As sunlight shines through the translucent upper layers of dry ice, the ice below sublimates—turning into vapor directly from the solid state—and creates pockets of trapped gas. The pressure builds until the ice layers at the surface begin to crack, sending jets of gas erupting to the surface, bringing black dust from below. After detonation, the dust returns to the surface in a fan-shaped form driven by the wind.

In an overhead view of the Australe Scopuli’s seasonal ice caps, layers of ice and dust overlap in a swirling nightmare across the Martian surface. The image was captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express, which allows the topography of the landscape to be derived from a digital terrain model. The image offers a closer look at the fan-shaped pattern created by the dust explosions, which create boundaries between layered deposits.

ESA’s Mars Express was launched in 2003, and has provided stunning images of the Martian landscape for more than 20 years. The spacecraft has compiled the most complete map of the chemical composition of Mars’ atmosphere, observed the planet’s moons Phobos and Deimos in detail, and traced the history of water across Mars, according to the ESA. The mission also carried a lander named Beagle 2, but it was lost on arrival and never conducted scientific operations on the Red (or, apparently, white) Planet.