There is an expansive gorge system on Mars that is almost ten times as long and three times as deep as the Grand Canyon of the Earth, making it the largest gorge in the solar system.
The canyon system, known as’ l ‘Valles Marineris’, stretches over 2,500 kilometers across the Mars equator (the distance between Los Angeles and New York City), which makes up about a quarter of the planet’s circumference, reports USA Today. According to the website, scientists use an ultra-high resolution camera to investigate how the geological formation originated.
The special camera is called HiRISE (short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) and was placed aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; scientists at the University of Arizona are using it to take photos of the planet’s strangest features since 2006, reports Live Science.
Recently, the university released a series of astonishing photos of Valles Marineris showing some of the formation’s most impressive details, USA Today reports. One of the images was recently uploaded to Twitter:
Check out the largest known gorge in the solar system! Valles Marineris of Mars is ten times as large and three times as deep as the Grand Canyon.
: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona pic.twitter.com/xYWYe11Y5S
– Russ McSpadden (@PeccaryNotPig) 5 January 2021
The University of Arizona has a website dedicated solely to the HiRISE camera. The website posts one HiRISE photo every day and has been doing so since December 1, 2018. You can view the entire gallery here. The HiRISE official Twitter account also post photos regularly:
HiPOD: light deposits along slopes of Coprates Chasma
Valles Marineris contains kilometers-thick sedimentary layers, low layers
along many of its floors. In this image we find similar deposits along wall rock slopes in Coprates Chasma. Https://t.co/hggCXZgTex pic.twitter.com/TUnhFN8nrj– HiRISE: Beautiful Mars (NASA) (@HiRISE) 25 December 2020
Unlike our Grand Canyon, Valles Marineris was probably not carved out by ripe water, reports Live Science. According to the site, the climate of the planet is too hot and dry to ever accommodate a river large enough to create such an impressive gorge.
According to the European Space Agency (ESA), a majority of the gorge probably formed billions of years ago when a group of nearby supervolcanoes (known as the Tharsis region) first broke through the earth’s crust, Live Science reports. According to their theory, the enormous amount of volcanic events could have caused a rift in Mars’ crust that initially created the gorge, and millions of years of weathering and erosion could have expanded it.
According to USA Today, future analyzes of high-resolution photographs such as these scientists will provide more clues to solve the strange origin of the solar system’s largest gap.