Overview
- ESA’s Mars Express released new high‑resolution views of the northern Shalbatana Vallis that show concentrated dark deposits and a main channel about 10 kilometers wide and 500 meters deep.
- Mission scientists say the blue‑black material is most likely volcanic ash that Martian winds later swept across the valley floor.
- The imagery refines a landscape shaped by short, catastrophic floods about 3.5 billion years ago, with jumbled “chaotic” blocks from melting buried ice and later lava that smoothed nearby plains.
- The valley extends roughly 1,300 kilometers toward Chryse Planitia, which some researchers consider a possible basin for an ancient ocean that may have collected these outflows.
- The data come from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express, operated by DLR with products built by Freie Universität Berlin, extending context from a 2025 HRSC video tour that traced the channel from Xanthe Terra to the lowlands.