Buried Impact Basins in the Northern Lowlands of Mars: Implications for Crustal Evolution and the Crustal Dichotomy

Details Buried Impact Basins in the Northern Lowlands of Mars: Implications for Crustal Evolution and the Crustal Dichotomy Buried Impact Basins in the Northern Lowlands of Mars: Implications for Crustal Evolution and the Crustal Dichotomy

May 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001agusm...p31a04f&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2001, abstract #P31A-04

Physics

5420 Impact Phenomena (Includes Cratering), 5455 Origin And Evolution, 5499 General Or Miscellaneous, 6225 Mars

Scientific paper

High resolution gridded Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) data have revealed the presence of > 600 large (> 50 km diameter) Quasi-Circular Depressions (QCDs) in the northern lowlands of Mars. These likely buried impact basins are generally not visible in Viking imagery and have a cumulative frequency curve which is higher than that for visible impact basins in the adjacent highlands, but less than the likely total population of basins in the highlands (visible and buried). This suggests the northern lowlands are very, very old, far older than the veneer of lowland plains which cover them and older even than the adjacent exposed highland surface. Unless there is some way to lower already heavily cratered terrain without destroying the craters, the lowlands formed extremely early in martian history. This suggests the elevation difference associated with the crustal dichotomy was established in the very earliest history of Mars, before most of the cratering that formed the now-present QCDs. Many of these craters in both the highlands and lowlands were then buried, and in the lowlands nearly all were covered further by later Hesperian and younger resurfacing. The lowland plains must in places be less than 1 km thick for any relief associated with the buried basins to be preserved, but in places where no QCDs are detectable (e.g., north of Alba Patera, SW of Olympus Mons) the plains could be > 4 km thick. The presence of a population of large buried impact basins in both the highlands and lowlands of Mars that is larger than the visible surface population in the highlands suggests a significantly higher-than-previously-believed cratering and resurfacing early in martian history. It also suggests a preserved (though buried) surface that pre-dates the earliest Noachian, and therefore current absolute chronologies which place the earliest Noachian at 4.65 BYA are likely incorrect.

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