The “honeycomb” terrain is a Noachian-aged cluster of ∼7 km wide linear cell-like depressions located on the northwestern floor of Hellas basin, Mars. A variety of origins have been proposed for the honeycomb terrain, including deformation rings of subglacial sediment, frozen convection cells from a Hellas impact melt sheet, a swarm of igneous batholiths, salt diapirism, and ice diapirism. Rece...

A steady-state creep law for rocksalt, describing the two parallel mechanisms of dislocation creep and fluid-enhanced grain-boundary diffusion creep, has been used in numerical models of salt diapirism, to study the effective viscosity of rocksalt. Typical models included a 3-km-thick sedimentary layer on top of 1 km of rocksalt. The grain size of the salt has been varied between 0.5 and 3 cm a...

Continental rifted margins are often associated with widespread, thick evaporite (i.e., salt) deposits and pronounced salt tectonics. The majority of basins formed during the latest stages rifting, prior to continental breakup. We use 2D thermo-mechanical finite element modeling lithospheric extension investigate interplay between margin architecture, late syn-rift deposition, post-rift focus o...

Diapirism has been discredited as a transport mechanism for magmas partly because diapirs seem to be unable to bring magmas to shallow crustal levels (< 10 km) and partly because recent developments in the theory of dyke propagation have shown that sufficiently wide dykes are able to efficiently transport felsic magmas through the crust. However, it is still unclear how felsic dykes grow to wid...