If you focus a telescope on the Red Planet on a clear Martian “sol,” you will see near its centre, a dark scar stretching over nearly half its face. This is Valles Marineris, the largest canyon system on Mars.
In Latin its name means “Mariner valley.” But Valles Marineris is quite unlike any of the river valleys we see on the Earth. Nearly seven kilometres deep, it surpasses the world’s deepest gorge, the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet, China, by close to a kilometre. At certain points it may be as deep as 10 kilometres, and as wide as 200 kilometres! It is also more than 4,000 kilometres long; this is nearly double the distance between Kochi and Delhi! For comparison, the famous Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA, is only 446 kilometres long, 29 kilometres at its widest and 1.9 kilometres at its deepest.
Valles Marineris runs below the Martian equator on the eastern side of the Tharsis bulge and Chryse Planitia, a circular plain where the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Viking 1 spacecraft landed in 1976. This fascinating canyon system is made up of a number of chasmata (its singular form is chasma), or deep and steep-sided fractures on the Martian surface. It starts with a chaotic system (a rough terrain with cracks, ridges and plains mixed together) on the east, and ends in a region of crisscrossing valleys, called Noctis Labyrinthus, on its west.
Picture Credit : Google
