I don't normally read USA Today for its science insight, and there's lots of other places to read about this, but it had a readable article about how Iapetus apparently accreted the debris of a Saturn moon moonlet that got busted up by the gravity of Iapetus, and the chunks rained down uponst the moon equatorially, resulting in the band of mountains. So it's supposedly an icy, aligned ridge.
No matter how one slices it, Iapetus is just plain WEIRD.
Iapetus' oddball shape explainedClose-up of the ridge:
The dark side of the highly-contrasted moon; the ridge is clearly seen here.
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