The Amazonian period has been dominated by impact crater formation and Aeolian processes with ongoing isolated volcanism occurring in the Tharsis region and Cerberus Fossae, including signs of activity as recently as a tens of thousands of years ago in the latter[4] and within the past few million years on Olympus Mons, implying they may still be active but dormant in the present.

Because it is the youngest of the Martian periods, the chronology of the Amazonian is comparatively well understood through traditional geological laws of superposition coupled to the relative dating technique of crater counting.

The scarcity of craters characteristic of the Amazonian also means that unlike the older periods, fine scale (<100 m) surface features are preserved.

Furthermore, the relative youth of this period means that over the past few 100 million years it remains possible to reconstruct the statistics of the orbital mechanics of the Sun, Mars, and Jupiter without the patterns being overwhelmed by chaotic effects, and from this to reconstruct the variation of solar insolation – the amount of heat from the sun – reaching Mars through time.

[26][27][28] System and Period are not interchangeable terms in formal stratigraphic nomenclature, although they are frequently confused in popular literature.

[30] A system is bound above and below by strata with distinctly different characteristics (on Earth, usually index fossils) that indicate dramatic (often abrupt) changes in the dominant fauna or environmental conditions.