The simularity to the American southwest is uncanny
Now that you mention that it’s kind of creepy.
Well, there's a simple basis for it ... aeolian erosion. Even the layers that are being eroded on Mars were, for the most part, deposited by dust storms. The processes there are almost unimaginably slow, and most of the erosion takes place during those planet-wide dust storms every ten years or so ... whatever it is.
The ability of the ultra-thin Martian air to carry dust is due to a famous paradox of fluid physics: That the viscosity of a gas is independent of density. The wind there cannot "drive" larger particles by its pressure, but it can suspend the fine dust by drag, and it is this that accounts for the character of the landscape there.