Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 353, Issue 6294, Pages 55-58Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf3206
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Funding
- NASA
- UK Space Agency
- NASA MSL Participating Scientist program
- KISS Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Caltech GPS Division Texaco Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship
- UK Space Agency [ST/J005169/1, ST/N000579/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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Wind blowing over sand on Earth produces decimeter-wavelength ripples and hundred-meter-to kilometer-wavelength dunes: bedforms of two distinct size modes. Observations from the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal that Mars hosts a third stable wind-driven bedform, with meter-scale wavelengths. These bedforms are spatially uniform in size and typically have asymmetric profiles with angle-of-repose lee slopes and sinuous crest lines, making them unlike terrestrial wind ripples. Rather, these structures resemble fluid-drag ripples, which on Earth include water-worked current ripples, but on Mars instead form by wind because of the higher kinematic viscosity of the low-density atmosphere. A reevaluation of the wind-deposited strata in the Burns formation (about 3.7 billion years old or younger) identifies potential wind-drag ripple stratification formed under a thin atmosphere.
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