Orbit-driven climate cycles exposed in sedimentary layers, "Quasi-Periodic Bedding in the Sedimentary Rock Record of Mars" Options

[imipak]

Universe Today article on a new Science paper, "Quasi-Periodic Bedding in the Sedimentary Rock Record of Mars" (abstract. ) (UT just happened to be the first write-up I came across; there's plenty of coverage elsewhere.)

"One of the fun things about this project for me is that we were able to use techniques on Mars that are the bread and butter of studies of stratigraphy on Earth," says Aharonson. "We substituted a high-resolution camera in orbit around Mars and stereo processing for a geologist's Brunton Compass and mapboard, and were able to derive the same quantitative information on the same scale. This enabled conclusions that have qualitative meaning similar to those we chase on Earth."

It would be curious if the process that caused this terraced / stepped terrain would only show up in one location; are there any similar landforms? ISTR seeing many HiRISE images of layered terrain where the layers appeared, to my lay eyes, to be superficially similar, but I'm no geologist. How ubiquitous an effect is this in layered sedimentary rocks? Informed comment gratefully received

[imipak]

CosmicRocker - the "supplementary data" (PDF) includes this table, plus the layer location and thickness data:

CODE

Crater Name    Location       Left Image        Right Image
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Becquerel      22◦N,352◦E     PSP 001546_2015   PSP 001955_2015
Crommelin      5◦N,350◦E      PSP 003432_1850   PSP 005766_1850
Unnamed        8◦N,353◦E      PSP 002733_1880   PSP 002878_1880
Unnamed        8◦N,359◦E      PSP 001902_1890   PSP 002047_1890

Table S1: HiRISE images used for stereo analysis at each location in Arabia Terra.

Becquerel:
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001546_2015 ; http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001955_2015

Crommelin:
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003432_1850 ; http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_005766_1850

Unnamed 1:
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_002733_1880 ; http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_002878_1880

Unnamed 2:
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001902_1890 ; http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_002047_1890