Inverted relief

[2] Several processes can cause the floor of a depression to become more resistant to erosion than its surrounding slopes and uplands: A classic example of inverted relief is Table Mountain, Tuolumne County, California.

These Miocene lava flows filled this ancient river valley with a thick sequence of potassium-rich trachyandesite lavas that are significantly more resistant to erosion than the Mesozoic siltstone and other rock in which the valley was cut.

[5] Another example is Table Mountain, Cape Town, where the original high ridges of resistant quartzitic sandstone of the Cape Fold Belt were eroded away first, exposing less resistant rock, which eroded faster, leaving the original valley bottom at the top of the residual mountain.

[4] Inverted relief in the form of sinuous and meandering ridges, which are indicative of ancient, inverted fluvial channels, is argued to be evidence of water channels on the Martian surface in the past.

[6][7][8][2][9][10] An example is Miyamoto Crater, which was proposed in 2010 as a potential location to be searched for evidence of life on Mars.

Inverted relief at former St. George Municipal Airport , Utah. The lava plateau upon which the airport was built once filled the bottom of a valley.
Inverted channels on Mars. These curved and crisscrossing ridges in the Aeolis region were once channels in a sediment fan . The channels were more resistant to wind erosion than the surrounding materials, so now they are left standing as ridges rather than valleys. Illumination is from the left.
Possible evolution of the Cape Town landscape: The nearly horizontal Table Mountain sandstones represent the trough and the steeply dipping sandstones of the same formations of the Hottentots Holland Mountains to the east the limb of a large fold that has since eroded away to expose the underlying shale. Thus the modern landscape may represent an inverted version of an earlier landscape (dashed lines) characterised by a large mountain where the Cape Flats are now. (after Compton 2004)