Icaria Planum is a region on Mars in the

Thaumasia quadrangle The Thaumasia quadrangle is one of a series of 30 quadrangle maps of Mars used by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Research Program. The Thaumasia quadrangle is also referred to as MC-25 (Mars Chart-25). The name comes fr ...

. It is located roughly south-southwest of the Tharsis Rise. Icaria Planum is named after the island of

Ikaria Ikaria, also spelled Icaria (; ), is a Greece, Greek island in the Aegean Sea, 10 nautical miles (19 km) southwest of Samos. Administratively, Ikaria forms a separate municipality within the Ikaria (regional unit), Ikaria regional unit, ...

, where, according to

Greek mythology Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of ancient Greek folklore, today absorbed alongside Roman mythology into the broader designation of classical mythology. These stories conc ...

Icarus In Greek mythology, Icarus (; , ) was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete. After Theseus, king of Athens and enemy of King Minos, escaped from the labyrinth, Minos suspected that Icarus and Daedalu ...

fell and died in the sea. Icaria Planum is relatively ancient and cratered, with an estimated age of 3.59 billion years. Some subsequent volcanic resurfacing occurred ~0.94 billion years ago, in the Middle Amazonian period. Icaria Planum hosts numerous wrinkle ridges, a class of compressional faults thought to have formed from stresses in the Martian crust. The wrinkle ridges in Icaria Planum formed roughly 3.46 billion years ago and are largely concentric to the Tharsis Rise, likely due to the immense weight of the emplaced volcanic material as Tharsis formed. Icaria Planum hosts an

alluvial fan An alluvial fan is an accumulation of sediments that fans outwards from a concentrated source of sediments, such as a narrow canyon emerging from an escarpment. They are characteristic of mountainous terrain in arid to Semi-arid climate, semiar ...

, likely due to the breach of an ancient paleolake from an impact crater close to the nearby

Claritas Fossae Claritas Fossae is a densely-dissected highland terrain on the Tharsis, Tharsis Rise of Mars, located immediately south of the Tharsis Montes. The fossae of the Claritas Fossae region are many superposed swarms of graben. Context Claritas Fossae ...

. Image:CTX Context image for layered mantle.jpg, CTX image from Icaria Planum that shows location of next image. Image:Layered mantle in Icaria Planum.JPG, Layers in mantle deposit, as seen by HiRISE, under the

HiWish program HiWish is a program created by NASA so that anyone can suggest a place for the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to photograph. It was started in January 2010. In the first few months of the program 3000 people signed up to use HiR ...

. Mantle was probably formed from snow and dust falling during a different climate.

References

{{Mars-stub Thaumasia quadrangle

See also

References