ESA has published photos of the plateau called Ascuris Planum on the planet Mars captured by the Mars Express space probe’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The landscape is full of fractures, deep scars generated by intense and prolonged tectonic forces that acted on the red planet for hundreds of millions of years. Those fractures are the extensions of the troughs existing in the area called Tempe Fossae, in the region called Tempe Terra, north-east of the vast region of Tharsis, where in ancient times active volcanoes generated enormous stress in the Martian crust and consequently the tectonic horst and graben visible today.
The region of Tharsis on Mars has been the subject of many studies to understand the history of Martian volcanoes, important in the red planet’s evolution. That region is very vast, a sort of bulge with a diameter of thousands of kilometers that formed over a very long time.
The Tempe Fossae area is close to Tharsis, and as a result, it was deeply sculpted by those forces and in this case, ESA’s Mars Express space probe focused on the Ascuris Planum plateau (top image ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO), where it’s possible to find perfect examples of graben and horst. These are geological structures that are normally paired in a tectonic fault with a horst delimited by a graben.
Over time, the graben of the northern part of Ascuris Planum, on the left in the top image, have been partially filled with debris-covered glaciers. The geological processes include erosion. These are the reasons why that area is much less “wrinkly” than the nearby one. The Mars Express space probe captured images of that plateau with those traces on September 30, 2019.
The study of the geological history of Ascuris Planum is part of the broader one of the Tharsis volcanoes, which had a significant influence on the entire planet with the activity they had when Mars was young. It’s possible that the volcanoes of Tharsis had an influence even on the oceans that existed on Mars between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago. The old Mars Express space probe continues to be important in reconstructing the planet’s history.
