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About 87 million miles (140 million kilometers) above the grand canyon, an even bigger and bigger abyss crosses the bowels of the red planet. Known as the Valles Marineris, this system of deep and vast canyons stretches over 4,000 km along the Martian equator, covering nearly a quarter of the planet’s circumference. That gash in the rock March is nearly 10 times longer than Earth’s Grand Canyon and three times deeper, making it the largest canyon in solar system – and, according to ongoing research from the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, one of the most mysterious.
Using an incredibly high-resolution camera called HiRISE (short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, UA scientists have been taking close-up photos of the planet’s strangest features since 2006 Despite some truly stunning images of Valles Marineris like the one below, posted on the HiRISE website December 26, 2020 – Scientists are still not sure how the gargantuan canyon complex formed.
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contrary to EarthThe Grand Canyon of Valles Marineris was probably not carved out by billions of years of runoff; the red planet is too hot and dry to have ever hosted a river big enough to cross the crust like this – however, Researchers from the European Space Agency (ESA) said, there is evidence that running water may have carved out some of the canyon’s existing canals hundreds of millions of years ago.
A majority of the canyon probably opened billions of years earlier, when a supergroup of volcanoes known as the Tharsis region, was first expelled from Martian soil, ESA said. As magma boiled beneath these monster volcanoes (which include Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system), the planet’s crust could easily have stretched, torn, and ultimately collapsed into the hollows and valleys that make up the Valles Marineris today, according to ESA.
Evidence suggests that subsequent landslides, magma flows and, yes, even some ancient rivers likely contributed to the canyon’s continued erosion over the following eons. Further analysis of high-resolution photos like these will help unravel the bizarre story of the origin of the largest canyon in the solar system.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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