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A squeezed Martian landscape

A squeezed Martian landscape
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 20, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label “tilted blocks in the low northern latitudes.”

At first glance this circle of tilted blocks appear to mark a place where something erupted from below, pushing and cracking the blocks away in all directions. If there was an eruption however it appears very little if anything poured out from below. Instead, the ground inside the hollow in the center is about the same elevation as the ground surrounding the tilted blocks.

Clearly some pressure from below pushed these surface blocks upward to crack and tilt, but the answer cannot be found in this close-up picture. Instead, we need to look wider, not only at the overview map below, but at the inset on that overview map.

Overview map

The white dot on the map to the right marks the location, about 300 miles southwest from the foot of the giant volcano Olympus Mons, and clearly on the lava flows that surround this volcano. In the inset, created from a global mosaic of all of MRO’s lower resolution context camera images, the white rectangle indicates the area covered by the picture above.

Note the white north-south dotted line in the inset that cuts through that box. This line marks the top of a faint and very low ridgeline, on which the circle of tilted blocks above sits. Though they are hard to see, the inset shows other cracked or tilted blocks both on this ridge and to its west.

All together, the evidence suggests these blocks were tilted and cracked when underground magma applied vertical pressure from below. Furthermore, the location near Olympus Mons and that north-south ridge suggests additional horizontal pressure was imposed, squeezing the surface to form a wrinkle ridge. The hard lava that formed the surface had to go somewhere, and thus it formed that ridge where the ground cracked.

This superficial explanation might explain what happened, but it doesn’t tell us much about the long term geological history. The hardened surface was formed first it appears, and then was reshaped by later volcanic events. We do not know however if these events related to Olympus, if at all.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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