Friday, January 23, 2009

If Hutton Had Been a Martian

An angular unconformity on Mars. Original source, full-size image.

Actually, looking at this carefully in the full-size version, I'm not absolutely convinced. The layers that we are apparently looking at edge-on look like they could be a dike, or a shear zone. I don't know of any evidence for large-scale faulting on Mars, so the latter seems less than likely, but a dike seems to me to be a strong possibility. On the other hand, this site just lifts its images and descriptions wholesale from NASA's press releases, and NASA undoubtedly has spent more time with their conclusion and has more expertise than me. So, just saying, there's something that doesn't look quite right about this to me. But whatever the interpretation, it's pretty interesting.

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