I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. It’s a lava tube.
Here is one of the few illustrations I can find that shows what’s going on. It’s the last drawing on the bottom left side of the page. Basically, a tube forms, cools off and hardens, and erosion (or perhaps another lava flow above the tube) exposes it.
Here’s another look at the process.
Here’s a fellow who thinks such structures might be snazzy places to live in on Mars. And another.
Sofa, one explanation I had run across was lavatubes that were more resistant to subsequent erosion than surrounding material. I did not pursue that thought primarily because the features under discussion appear concave to me.
Martian vulcanism is a ways away from what I typically contemplate, but perhaps there were subterranean or near such tube flows of lava. Taking one of your sources at face value (Martian Lava Tubes Revisited), what we see in the photos would have to be Surface Tubes, Semitrenches, True Trenches or Rift Tubes, if they’re tubes at all. I seem to recall that those who think Mars had surface water at some point believe this area to have been oceanic floor. So, despite what my own eyes tell me I’ll jam with your proposal. Questions that occur: 1) of the mentioned lava tube types, can you direct us to terrestrial aerial photography or radar images of such to compare? and, 2) what of the repetitive features that figure so prominently in the Hoagland et al analysis? To me, as posted above, they appear, at this point, best explained as erosional incisions in face rock.
I’m not tryin’ to shoot you down, pal. Hell, I don’t know what we’re looking at. But, as to the last point, these repetitive feature occur and they may be a remnant of the cyclicity that is present in both water-borne ripple effects and wind driven dune building. Not possessing any significant knowledge of fluid dynamics outside of the knowledge that it’s more fun to pour Crown Royal than it is to pour Smirnoff, I’d have to suppose such cyclical effects would be more prominently displayed in the interior of the tube, where the primary flow was, than on the exterior.
Look at the link I placed as here above and tell me if you think it’s something different.
Just thoughts.
I’ve been driving myself half crazy to find some pictures to back my theory up. I’ve seen footage of them on TV, and I’ve read descriptions of them actually protruding from the sides of volcanos. Now, I can find nothing. This is obviously the work of the same insidious people who faked the moon landings.
I’ve assumed that the rippled effect of the tubes is related to the “washboard effect” that you see on gravel roads and on sand dunes, but I, too, am not a fluid guy. Here is an interior photo of a lava tube in Hawaii. You can plainly see a bottleneck, which I think would translate into a “ripple” on the exterior of the tube.
I think OpalCat would agree that you shouldn’t take my word for it, so feel free to tear this idea apart. To date I’ve found no other explanation that seems to fit the circumstances as well as this one.
I think that the excellent photo you provided might actually help back me up. What I see in that photo is a lava tube that clogged and burst upstream, creating a channel that ran alongside, and overtop of, the original tube, still following the path of least resistence.
Okay, I asked a Mars guy. He said that the valley itself might be a collapsed lava tube, but that the ridges are pretty obviously sand dunes formed by winds channeled through the valleys, in his opinion. In the interests of full disclosure, I did contaminate his thinking by mentioning dunes before I showed him the image, but he seemed fairly confident, within the limits of his experience (he’s a 3rd year grad student), that they’re dunes.
I urge you to go back to the large MOC image and check out the other areas where there are similar sets of “ridges,” but less well organized, in shallower valleys. In particular, look at the uppermost small valley on the far right hand side of the image, about 2/3 of the way up.
It’s true that the big one LOOKS convex, but I think that’s just the shape of the dunes tricking your eye. I think the other ones look very flat.
And he says that those bright spots, like the “glare” and knobs, harder material that hasn’t been eroded away, that catch finer (lighter colored) dust.
Whoops, also, here’s another website that refers to Clarke, and cites a “real” NASA geologist & Mars guy Robert Anderson:
A couple more images:
Dunes in a trough (MGS MOC Release No. MOC2-248):
http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/aug_1_00/index.html
More bright dunes (MGS MOC Release No. MOC2-201):
http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/1_31_00_dunes/override_dunes/index.html
From Podkayne, who just doesn’t know When to Quit. : )
That was my opinion as well when I saw the image. The glare is a contrast effect from picking which pixels are white and which are black. Choosing your contrast can make or break an image interpretation, and is one more in an excrutiatingly long list of things which can mix you up.
By the way, at MSSS there is one guy who looks at all the images. He’s a busy dude. Mostly, he just checks them out for anything obvious, and then they get archived. MSSS is a small operation, surprisingly. Read about them here: http://www.msss.com
Let me know if he’s hiring! 
Here’s the link to the Clarke article, if anyone’s still interested…
http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/clarke_believe_010227.html
And here’s a link from Art Bell co-conspirator Whitley Strieber’s site, claiming that at a June 6 lecture, Clarke made clear his belief that we have found “at least” vegetation on Mars. It also has an interesting picture of “Martian trees.”
