NASA | JPL-Caltech | Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter | 2017 Jan 25
[img3="This view from the HiRISE camera on NASA's MRO shows part of an area on Mars where narrow rock ridges, some as tall as a 16-story building, intersect at angles forming corners of polygons. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona"]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/ima ... _hires.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]Thin, blade-like walls, some as tall as a 16-story building, dominate a previously undocumented network of intersecting ridges on Mars, found in images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The simplest explanation for these impressive ridges is that lava flowed into pre-existing fractures in the ground and later resisted erosion better than material around them.
A new survey of polygon-forming ridges on Mars examines this network in the Medusae Fossae region straddling the planet's equator and similar-looking networks in other regions of the Red Planet. ...
The pattern is sometimes called boxwork ridges. Raised lines intersect as the outlines of multiple adjoining rectangles, pentagons, triangles or other polygons. Despite the similarity in shape, these networks differ in origin and vary in scale from inches to miles. ...
Polygonal ridge networks on Mars: Diversity of morphologies
and the special case of the Eastern Medusae Fossae Formation - Laura Kerber et al
- Icarus 281:200 (01 Jan 2017) DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2016.08.020