hi yes i'm still around. i am now a scientist who has made it into a nature journal, which is kinda neat. the link goes to an open-access article, which you can read free of charge!
the gist of it is that mars once experienced a form of tectonic activity that may have been an early evolutionary step on the path to developing plate tectonics.
plate tectonics is a 'horizontal' crust recycling process - freshly erupted lavas on the ocean floor are slowly carried away by older lavas that are kindly recycling themselves at the local subduction zone. before earth got to that point, we had 'vertical' crust recycling processes. these were more limited in scope, and essentially involved lava piling up so thickly that the sheer weight of everything on top caused minerals to start transforming to their high-pressure forms. in turn, this kickstarted a process where some parts of the crust began dragging themselves into the mantle ("sagduction"), and created new types of magma other parts of the crust more buoyant (creating the cores of what would become continents). eventually, these vertical centers of recycling began to organize and take on a more horizontal component, and over a few hundred million years transitioned into modern plate tectonics.
the cool thing we found is that in one region of mars, the eridania region in its southern mid latitudes, the landscape resembles what we would expect to see if vertical tectonics was starting to occur. what's better is that we even see rocks with the expected compositions, distributed in the way we would expect to see. these overlap with other weird things we see in the area (if you've heard of mars' magnetic stripes - this is where they're located), so identifying this type of tectonics might be the piece that helps put the puzzle together.
