Martian chaos terrain

Chaos terrain on Mars is distinctive; nothing on Earth compares to it. Chaos terrain generally consists of irregular groups of large blocks, some tens of kilometers across and a hundred or more meters high. The tilted and flat topped blocks form depressions hundreds of metres deep. A chaotic region can be recognized by a rat's nest of mesas, buttes, and hills, chopped through with valleys which in places look almost patterned. Some parts of this chaotic area have not collapsed completely—they are still formed into large mesas, so they may still contain water ice. Chaos regions formed long ago. By counting craters (more craters in any given area means an older surface) and by studying the valleys' relations with other geological features, scientists have concluded the channels formed 2.0 to 3.8 billion years ago.

The greatest concentrations of chaotic terrain are in the same locations as giant, ancient river valleys. Because so many large channels seem to originate from chaotic terrain, it is widely believed that chaos terrain is caused by water coming out the ground in the form of massive floods. Most of the chaotic terrain exists in the highlands of Mars, south of Chryse Planitia, in the Oxia Palus quadrangle, and along the Martian dichotomy. But some chaos regions can be found in Margaritifer Sinus quadrangle, Phaethontis quadrangle, and Lunae Palus quadrangle.

Many different theories have been advanced for how floods of water came to be released with the formation of chaotic terrain. Evidence for the involvement of water has been found—minerals associated with water, such as grey, crystalline hematite and phyllosilicates, are present in chaos regions. Many explanations for the creation of chaos involve the sudden melting of giant reservoirs of ground ice. Some researchers have suggested that a frozen layer, called a cryosphere, developed over a long time period and then something triggered it to rupture and melt suddenly. The rupturing event may have been impacts, magma movements, seismic activity, volcanic tectonic strains, increased pore pressure, or the dissociation of clathrates. A clathrate composed of carbon dioxide and methane could have explosively dissociated, thereby liquefying water-saturated sediments. A variation of this idea of a cryosphere is that an aquifer was created along with the cryosphere. As more and more ice was added resulting in a thicker cryosphere, the water in the aquifer became pressurized. When something like an impact or movement of magma broke or melted the cryosphere, floods of water under great pressure were released. However, further calculations showed that the great channels could not have been produced with just a single discharge. Later proposals advanced the notion that the geological shapes present in chaos regions could have been made by a series of over a 100 flooding events.

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