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All of the Cerberus Fossae elongated trenches on the Elysium plain run in the same direction: from north-west to south-east. At the centre of the image we see the two most conspicuous trenches: further to the south (left on the picture; where north is to the right) we can also see two additional, narrow trenches. The forces, which culminated in the crust breakup, acted perpendicularly to this. The smooth areas consist of solidified, low viscosity lava. The small number of impact craters on its surface shows that the volcanic eruptions took place in the recent geological past. If we zoom into the picture, we can see many places where the lava flow front ran and where it left its mark on topographical ‘obstacles’. Lava also made its way out from the Fossae to the surface, and at times possibly also water.

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

The landscape in the Cerberus Fossae region looks as though it has been sliced through with a knife. The tectonic fissure structures were created less than 100 million years ago, and possibly even less than 10 million years ago. This is also apparent from the profile of the Fossae, which are confined by extremely steep and in some cases almost perpendicular walls, which in some places are more than 500 metres high.

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

If, in a distant future, astronauts drove their Mars vehicles over the Elysium plain on a survey, travelling north eastwards to the Elysium Mons and Alba Patera volcanoes, standing at the edge of the Cerberus Fossae, they would have a similar experience as the Spanish pioneer García López de Cárdenas. In the year 1540 – as the first European to do so – he gazed in astonishment at the view from the edge of the Grand Canyon. Like him, the astronauts would have to choose between retracing their route or making a major detour. The walls of the Cerberus Fossae are extremely steep, almost perpendicular in places, and can be more than 500 metres high locally. They were created as the result of expansion in the Martian crust, in the form of tectonic fractures, through which magma was able to rise to the surface and to flood the plains with a thin layer of lava.

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Anaglyph images are produced using the data acquired by the nadir channel of the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), the field of view of which is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, and one of the four obliquely angled stereo channels. Anaglyphs create a realistic, three-dimensional impression of the landscape when viewed through red/blue or red/green glasses. This makes it easy to see that the numerous craters in the centre of the image, which originally would have had a bowl-shape, have been flooded by thin lava and sometimes filled almost to their edges with volcanic deposits. By contrast, the large crater at the right hand (northern) edge of the image, which is approximately 30 kilometres wide, has a formidable crater rim which would have prevented the lava from the flood to flow into the inside of the crater, which is approximately 2500 metres deep. Using the zoom function we can examine the Cerberus Fossae rift valley, whose width exceeds one kilometre in just a few places.

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

On the Elysium Plain, Elysium Mons and Albor Tholus are two major volcanoes which are thought to have remained active until Mars’ recent geological past. Consequently, in the wider area around these volcanoes, there are many signs of tectonic activity such as extensional faults that include the Cerberus Fossae. In the course of orbit 17813, the HRSC camera system on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft acquired the strips of photographs featured here, and the region for the pictures shown in this release can be seen in the box.

Credit: NASA/JPL (MOLA)/FU Berlin.

The strips of photographs taken, from various angles, by the HRSC camera system aboard Mars Express, provided the basis for computing digital terrain models for the surface of Mars, including elevation models for each area of the photographs. The colour-coded topographic view (5) is based on a digital terrain model (DTM) of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived. The reference body for the HRSC-DTM is a Mars equipotential surface (Areoid). Differences in elevation are easily distinguished, thanks to the digital terrain model’s colour coding: the lowest elevation area, in a large crater which is approximately 30 kilometres wide, is located 5500 metres below the Areoid, and the regions shown in red, at -3000 metres, are located at least 2.5 kilometres higher. The Cerberus Fossae are up to 500 m deep.

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.