John Murray emailed me back. Here's what he said:
Erik,
I'm afraid this was something of a mis-quote. I gave a talk at the National Astronomy Meeting on recent HRSC images of Mars, showing some strangely regular subsidence features that were the source of channels, for which there is strong evidence that they were formed by water. I also showed some Orbiter V pictures from 1967 that showed very similar-looking features on the Moon. So not exactly recent! just 38 years old...
John Murray
Looks like you were right Raoul, he was talking about Mars and the reporter screwed up. It sounded too far fetched to believe.