[X] My Assistant

[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