Southern highlands stamped with salt flats and Mars' magnetic stripes.
Terra Sirenum is a rugged southern highland notable for widespread chloride salt deposits left by evaporated water, and for lying over some of the strongest crustal magnetic anomalies on Mars. Both features make it a key site for studying the planet's wet, magnetic youth.
Claim your plot here →Scattered across Terra Sirenum are pale chloride salt deposits — the dried residue of ponds and shallow lakes that evaporated billions of years ago. To geologists they are direct evidence that liquid, salty water once pooled in the low points of this highland, and seasonal briny flows may still be possible in a few places today.
Beneath the surface, Terra Sirenum overlies some of the most strongly magnetized crust on Mars, arranged in alternating stripes. These record a time when the young planet still had a global magnetic field, long since switched off. Salt above and magnetism below make Sirenum a double window into early Mars.