Mars has tectonics without tectonic plates. Thing about plates is that they are horizontal. What if Mars had tectonic walls? - or at least pillars.
Such is what Joseph Michalsky et al. report from Hong Kong. Old Mars was like Archaean Earth (postHadean Splat): volcanoes stacked up and caved the crust down to the mantle. The volcanoes left there are high in silica, not basalts like Lunar maria or like our own ocean floor.
I am pretty sure an ocean existed here on Archaean Earth but it was just sitting atop, not lubricating plates.
As to Mars: the volcanoes look like a place to look for granites, nu?
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