Posted on 10/12/2013 9:21:37 AM PDT by lbryce
Open pit Spice mine.
That’s because it’s on location in California. ;^)
It's just north of the "Valles Marineris," one of the largest rift systems in the solar system. I would bet they were formed at the same time.
WHOA! Those pics are BEYOND AWESOME!!!! Thanks for the ping!
And there’s no one there to raise them, if you did.
The area at the top of the picture looks like a glacial Cirque, the bottom right like lateral or terminal moraines. Normally you see this with glaciation on mountain side, it might leave a hanging valley with a cirque at its head. Here its appears to be forming in a plain...
Perhaps the geography slopes towards the bottom of the picture. If there was a time where there was still subsurface heat, and subsurface water, perhaps a number of artesian springs surfaced here, water froze, picked up material at the head of the “cirque, and it pushed a local ice sheet to the bottom of the picture. The ice sublimated and deposited the moraines at the bottom of the picture.
It could also be that more water resulted in more ice anchored on one side. The remaining ice flowed in the path of least resistance and resulted in the moraines.
It also has the look of a blowout that results from wind erosion of topsoil, just a bit deeper than normal!
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