Forget the Grand Canyon. Mars has a scar across its face that dwarfs anything on Earth. Valles Marineris is 4,000 kilometres long. That is roughly the distance from New York to California. It plunges seven kilometres deep and spans up to 200 kilometres wide. And it wasn’t carved by a gentle river over millions of years. It is a tectonic rift. The crust of the planet literally split open and stretched as the massive Tharsis volcanic region bulged upward.
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