About 140 million kilometers above the Grand canyona larger, larger abyss cuts through the bowels of the Red Planet. This system of deep, expansive gorges, known as Valles Marineris, runs more than 4,000 km (4,000 km) along the Mars equator and extends over nearly a quarter of the planet’s circumference. This slap in the face of March is almost ten times as long as the Earth’s Grand Canyon and three times deeper, making it the largest single gorge in the country solar system – and according to ongoing research from the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, one of the most mysterious.
Using an incredible high-resolution camera called HiRISE (short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, UA scientists have been taking close-up shots of the planet’s strangest features since 2006. Despite some breathtaking images of Valles Marineris like the one below, posted on the HiRISE website on December 26, 2020 – scientists are not yet sure how the huge gorge complex originated.
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Other than EarthGrand Canyon, Valles Marineris, was probably not carved out by billions of years of stormwater; the Red Planet is too hot and dry to ever accommodate a river large enough to cut through the crust like this – Researchers from the European Space Agency (ESA) said, there is evidence that flowing water could have deepened some of the canyon’s existing canals hundreds of millions of years ago.
A majority of the gorge probably broke open billions of years before when a nearby supergroup of volcanoes known as the Tharsis region was first pushed out of Martian soil, the ESA said. While magma beneath these monster volcanoes (which include Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system), could have easily stretched, tore the earth’s crust and eventually collapsed into the basins and valleys that make up Valles Marineris, according to the ESA.
Evidence suggests that subsequent landslides, magma flows and yes, even some ancient rivers probably contributed to the erosion of the gorge during the following centuries. Further analysis of high-resolution photos like these will help solve the strange origin of the solar system’s largest gap.
Originally published on Live Science.