Hourglass shaped craters filled with traces of a glacier
Fri Mar 18, 2005 at 14:18 UTC
An image taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, shows flow features most likely formed by glaciers or 'block' glaciers.
This unusual structure with traces of a glacier is located in Promethei Terra at the eastern rim of the Hellas Basin, at about latitude 38º South and longitude 104º East. A so-called 'block' glacier, flowed from a flank of the massif, past mountains several thousand metres high, into a bowl-shaped impact crater (left), nine kilometres wide, which has been filled nearly to the rim. The block glacier then flowed into a 17 kilometre wide crater, 500 metres below, taking advantage of downward slope.
