system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why does mars have ANY surface features given that it has no plate tectonics and has wind storms?

My 9 year old daughter asked this question today. I googled and found that mars definitely doesn't have plate tectonics. Wouldn't everything get corroded overtime to make the planets surface very smooth? But we know it has valleys, canyons and mountains. Is that due asteroid imapcts?

Sorry, if this sounds like a very dumb question.
gpt
Mars used to have both running water and large amounts of volcanic activity, and that formed a lot of surface features, many of them extremely dramatic. Today those features don't actually have a terrible lot to wear them down.

The wind does some erosion, but with such a thin atmosphere remaining and no rain, the erosion rate from just the wind is going to be low compared to here on Earth. Consider taht Olympus Mons is 2.5 times as tall as Everest. It's gonna take a **serious long time** for the wind to flatten that thing out.

Plus it does still get hit by meteorites, and with such low erosion levels the craters stick around for quite a while too.