Traces of marsquakes from the past
Traces of marsquakes from the past
Traces of tectonic stresses and marsquakes are omnipresent on our planetary neighbour. Patterns of almost linear and parallel fracture structures caused by the stretching of the brittle crust and the resulting fractures are very common, particularly in the southern highlands, which are more than three billion years old. The stretching creates additional space perpendicular to the direction of the acting tectonic force, into which entire blocks of crust sag and crustal segments remain between these sagged blocks, creating a characteristic landscape pattern known in geological terminology worldwide by the German terms ‘Horst and Graben’. Such major structural changes are always accompanied by strong quakes. Examples on Earth are the East African Rift Valley or the Upper Rhine Graben.
