Click for original image.

This cool image poses a mystery that might be important for future colonists. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 23, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team merely labels this vaguely as simply “landforms.” What it appears to be is an ancient flow of mudlike material or a delta that moved from the west to the east. Its nature is even more evident in the full picture. The top of the delta however appears corroded and old, with a number of craters on top suggesting it has been here for a long time.

Its mudlike appearances suggests water was involved, possibly as ice impregnated within the soil. However, the location says no, unless this occurred so long ago that the entire climate of Mars and this region was vastly different. And in fact, it might have been.

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, inside the outflow channels from which the catastrophic floods are thought to have come from Valles Marineris to the west. This location is also theorized by some scientists to have been the location of an intermittent inland sea in the far past, when those floods were occurring.

The inset gives us a more detailed but wider look at the region surrounding this picture, with the rectangle indicating the area covered by the picture itself. The key to understanding at least partly what happened to form these geological features is the changing depth of the floor of the six-mile-wide unnamed crater. The mountain peak on the west sits about 8,000 feet above the near crater floor, but that floor than slopes downward another 1,000 feet to the east.

In other words, it appears this crater was formed when a bolide plowed into the ground at an oblique angle, coming from the west. That path not only chopped off the eastern end of the mesa, it caused the ground to flow eastward to form the delta.

What remains a mystery is whether near surface ice or water was involved. Today this location is at 11 degrees north latitude, in the dry equatorial regions. It is unlikely that there is any ice anywhere near the surface. However, that theorized intermittent ocean billions of years ago might have been present when the impact occurred, thus explaining the flow.

Or not. It is also possible the flow is simply impact melt, rock turned to liquid by the energy of the collision that flowed for a short while and then hardened.

I suspect the image was taken as an effort to determine which. If water ice however is determined to still be present here, though possibly buried, it would provide future settlers another place in the warmer Martian tropics where water is available nearby, even if it must be mined to reach and process.