Cracking up: Faulting on Earth and Mars

Abstract

Igneous dyke emplacement along the roughly 450 km long system of graben-like cracks forming Cerberus Fossae in Elysium Planitia, Mars, is thought to have cracked the cryosphere, releasing vast quantities of confined groundwater as acqueous floods and allowing eruption of lava in the last 1% (24 Ma) of martian evolution. We describe here comparisons between fault lengths and throws, on Mars and on Earth, with the aim of understanding how the faulting happened and how fracturing, cryosphere-derived water and volcanism have interacted through time, ultimately facilitating a correlation between surface landforms and volcano-tectonic events.