Anyone who has ever visited the Grand Canyon in the United States knows how great it is. The Grand Canyon certainly lives up to its name, but it has nothing on a ravine on the surface of Mars. NASA has released new images of the largest gorge in the solar system, which is nearly ten times as long as the Grand Canyon and three times as deep.
The gorge is known as Valles Marineris, and it is a deep and expansive gorge system that runs more than 2500 kilometers along the equator of Mars. The massive gorge system covers nearly 25 percent of the entire circumference of Mars. To put this in perspective, compared to the Grand Canyon, Valles Marineris is almost ten times longer and three times deeper.
The new images were captured using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. One of the great mysteries about Mars is how exactly such a massive gorge system formed. On Earth, the Grand Canyon has been formed by flowing water over billions of years.
NASA says that Mars is too hot and dry to ever have a river large enough to cut through its crust and create the massive gorge system. The ESA says there is evidence that flowing water could have deepened the existing canals of the canals hundreds of millions of years ago.
Scientists believe that the majority of the gorge probably broke open billions of years ago when a nearby supergroup of volcanoes known as the Tharsis region first jumped off the Martian soil. Magma bubbling up under the massive volcanoes, including Olympus Mons, could have stretched and shaken the crust, which eventually collapsed into the bowls and valleys that make up Valles Marineris. Evidence suggests that the Canyon system was further formed by landslides, magma flows, and ancient rivers.