System of tectonic features common to Earth, Mars, and Venus

Abstract

Investigations of landforms on the terrestrial planets have revealed a system of tectonic features consisting of long, narrow, regularly spaced folds and/or thrust faults, referred to as wrinkle ridges, and conjugate sets of cross- trending strike-slip faults. These are observed in the Yakima fold belt of the Columbia Plateau, Earth, the ridged plains of the Tharsis province, Mars, and the lowland plains of Lavinia Planitia, Venus. The wrinkle ridges and strike- slip faults reflect a relatively small amount of crustal shortening in these regions of distributed deformation. The observed geometric relations between the structures are consistent with those predicted by the Coulomb-Anderson model. Although the tectonic settings of the provinces studied on the three planets are very different, the crustal materials appear to have deformed in a similar manner.