期刊
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-PLANETS
卷 127, 期 5, 页码 -出版社
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2021JE007087
关键词
fluvial ridges; inverted channels; relief inversion; african humid period; deltas; earth analogs
资金
- Swiss Confederation excellence fellowships program [2017.1006]
- Augustin Lombard fellowship
- Ernst et Lucie Schmidheiny Foundation fellowship
- UK Space Agency funding [ST/R002355/1, ST/V002678/1, ST/W002566/1]
- French National Research Agency [ANR-10-EQPX-20]
- European Research Council [818602]
This study investigates the formation and preservation of fluvial depositional systems in the eastern Sahara as an analogue to understand the complexity of Martian fluvial activity and its response to external factors. The findings suggest that similar fluvial systems on Mars may have formed due to intermittent episodes of erosion and deposition, influenced by rainfall and aeolian processes.
A widely hypothesized but complex transition from widespread fluvial activity to predominantly aeolian processes is inferred on Mars based on remote sensing data observations of ancient landforms. However, the lack of analysis of in situ martian fluvial deposits hinders our understanding of the flow regime nature and sustainability of the martian fluvial activity and the hunt for ancient life. Studying analogs from arid zones on Earth is fundamental to quantitatively understanding geomorphic processes and climate drivers that might have dominated during early Mars. Here we investigate the formation and preservation of fluvial depositional systems in the eastern Sahara, where the largest arid region on Earth hosts important repositories of past climatic changes. The fluvial systems are composed of well-preserved single-thread sinuous to branching ridges and fan-shaped deposits interpreted as deltas. The systems' configuration and sedimentary content suggest that ephemeral rivers carved these landforms by sequential intermittent episodes of erosion and deposition active for 10-100s years over similar to 10,000 years during the late Quaternary. Subsequently, these landforms were sculpted by a marginal role of rainfall and aeolian processes with minimum erosion rates of 1.1 +/- 0.2 mm/yr, supplying similar to 96 +/- 24 x 10(10) m(3) of disaggregated sediment to adjacent aeolian dunes. Our results imply that similar martian fluvial systems preserving single-thread, short distance source-to-sink courses may have formed due to transient drainage networks active over short durations. Altogether, this study adds to the growing recognition of the complexity of interpreting climate history from orbital images of landforms.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据