superposition
June 15, 2020
June 15, 2020 Utopia Planitia is an ancient plain in the northern lowlands of Mars, thought to be made of volcanic rocks that were buried, more than 3 billion years ago, by sediments carried by water coming down from the […]
April 13, 2018
This is the 3rd (and final) entry in a blog series describing a paper I recently published with colleagues in JGR Planets. Here are links to the previous two entries: Part 1, Part 2. Wow, I didn’t think this would […]
December 26, 2017
A Piece of Mars: To see this one well you’ll have to click on the image. At the lower right, a 240 m (787 ft) diameter crater formed when a bolide hit the surface, throwing out ejecta on the surrounding […]
August 7, 2017
A Piece of Mars: The large dunes in the middle of this 375×450 m (0.23×0.28 mi) scene run along a valley (the small dunes at top and bottom are on high ground). What’s amazing about this is that the ends […]
January 30, 2017
A Piece of Mars: How do you tell when a planetary landscape shows Mars, instead of Mercury or the Moon or Europa? The easiest way to tell is to look for both craters and dunes, like what’s shown here in […]
January 23, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Sometimes in the floors of small craters, the wind blows in from several directions to produce odd polygon-shaped dunes that look like crochet (maybe Mars is making sweaters for its craters – it is, after all, […]
December 26, 2016
A Piece of Mars: Nicholas Steno was a 19th century geologist, who came up with some principles that are still used today to guide interpretation of exposed sedimentary rocks. The principles seem a bit obvious, but then some of the […]
May 31, 2016
A Piece of Mars: Some parts of Mars, like this one, are very dusty. This 1.92×1.1 km (1.2×0.67 mi) area has built up a thick deposit of dust that slowly buries the impact craters until they’re mere ghosts of the […]
May 23, 2016
A Piece of Mars: This 0.96×0.54 km (0.60×0.34 mi) scene shows two sets of bedforms (dunes), each aligned in different directions. The more closely-spaced set has sharper crests, and it’s superposed on top of (and it is therefore younger than) […]