River water does not always carve out wide valleys. In some areas, where there are fairly soft rocks, for instance, very deep, narrow valleys with vertical sides called canyons are formed. In places where continents are drifting apart, very wide rift valleys and flat areas known as plateaux can appear. The Great Rift Valley in Africa is the biggest example of these.
The resistant parts of the canyon walls of the Martian rift complex Valles Marineris have been used to infer an earlier, less eroded reconstruction of the major troughs. The individual canyons were then compared with individual rifts of East Africa. When measured in units of planetary radius, Martian canyons show a distribution of lengths nearly identical to those in Africa, both for individual rifts and for compound rift systems. A common mechanism which scales with planetary radius is suggested. Martian canyons are significantly wider than African rifts. This is consistent with the long-standing idea that rift width is related to crustal thickness: most evidence favors a crust on Mars at least 50% thicker than that of Africa. The overall pattern of the rift systems of Africa and Mars are quite different in that the African systems are composed of numerous small faults with highly variable trend. On Mars the trends are less variable; individual scarps are straighter for longer than on Earth. This is probably due to the difference in tectonic histories of the two planets: the complex history of the Earth and the resulting complicated basement structures influence the development of new rifts. The basement and lithosphere of Mars are inferred to be simple, reflecting a relatively inactive tectonic history prior to the formation of the canyonlands.
Picture Credit : Google