Chaotic Terrain

Note: This page is still under construction.

Chaotic Terrain terrain is used two ways by planetary scientists.

• The first is when a giant impactor on one side of a world causes massive shockwaves to travel thru the crust. When these shock waves collide on the opposite side of the world, the antipode, the shockwaves cancel out and combine chaotically fracturing the curst and making strange formations which planetary scientists call chaotic terrain.
• The second is when terrain saturated in ice melts from below. The water turns to liquid and flows away, leaving a strange area of collapses and gullies.

Both of these types of terrain have occurred on Mars.

Examples of Chaotic Terrain in the Solar System:

• On Mercury there is the Caloris Impact Basin which is about 1,550 km in diameter. On the exact antipode from this impact is chaotic terrain which (also known a 'weird terrain'), which is made up of hilly, grooved terrain with few impact craters.
• On Earth, at the antipode of the Chicxulub Impact Event is India. At that time the Deccan Traps formed. The Deccan Traps were cased when huge cracks opened in the Earth's surface and massive amounts of Lava flowed out, forming lava flows, in some areas, 2 km thick. (Approximately 1,000,000 cubic kilometres of lava were produced.) Gerta Keller, in a 2015 paper, has argued that the Chicxulub Impact created chaotic terrain on the Earth and the fractures produced in the crust allowed the Deccan Traps to form.

• On Jupiter's moon, Europa there is the Conamara Chaos. No impact on the opposite side the world remains, but the ice plates over a liquid ocean may have erased a previous impact basin.

• On Pluto chaotic Terrain can be found at the antipode from Sputnik Planitia.

Examples of Chaotic Terrain on Mars:

Hydraotes Chaos on Mars.

Note that Noctis Labyrinthus (the Labyrinth of the Night), west of Valles Marineris, was once thought to have been created by this process, but now is believed to have been created by faulting. (That is, this mesa and gully terrain is created when horsts are up thrust, and the corresponding gaben sink.)

The Tharsis Bulge and the Hellas basin are at approximate antipodes from each other. (In particular, Olympus Mons is very near to the opposite side of the planet from Hellas Planitia.) It is possible that chaotic terrain caused by the Hellas impact weakened the crust at Tharsis and triggered or aided the formation of the Tharsis Bulge.

Biography:

"Deccan Volcanism, the Chicxlub Impact, and the end-Cretaceous mass extinction: Coincidence? Cause and effect?" by Keller, G. Published in Volcanism, Impacts, and Mass Extinctions: Causes and Effects, GSA Special Paper 505. https://web.archive.org/web/20170618024315/http://specialpapers.gsapubs.org/content/early/2014/06/10/2014.2505_03.1.abstract

Noctis Labyrinthus on wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis_Labyrinthus

"Chaos Terrains on Pluto, Europa, and Mars -- Morphological Comparison of Blocks", Skjetne et. al. https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2019/pdf/2146.pdf