Rupes Recta – the Straight Wall (strictly speaking, “Straight Cliff), a 110 km linear fault escarpment on the edge of Mare Nubium.
Looks like a steep cliff but it’s actually a fairly gentle slope 300 meters high and 2-3 km wide. Imaging conditions were poor, clouds coming and going, so I could collect only about 2600 frames, of which this image uses 780, but I was determined to capture this feature.
According to a 2013 paper by Amanda Nahm and Richard Schultz, Lyell Collection of the Geological Society, London, Rupes appears to have a “genetic relationship” to the Rima Birt rille, visible here just left of and parallel to the upper half of Rupes. They estimate that regional stress generated both features no earlier than 3.2 billion years, making Rupes probably one of the youngest large-scale normal (stretch-related) faults on the Moon as well as one of the most prominent.
They also estimate its maximum vertical displacement at 400 meters and the depth of the nearly vertical fault plane at 42 km.
See
https://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/401/1/377
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