Planetary science: Martian debris flows
from 'recent' running water *VIDEO*
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Nature Communications
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Planetary science
Embargo
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London: Tuesday 23 June 2015 16:00 (BST)
New York: Tuesday 23 June 2015 11:00 (EDT)
Tokyo: Wednesday 24 June 2015 00:00 (JST)
Sydney: Wednesday 24 June 2015 01:00 (AEST)
Evidence that running water caused frequent debris flows on Mars is reported in a paper
published in Nature Communications. Although there is no running water there now, it is
thought that sufficient water was flowing in the last million years to cause these frequent
flows, suggesting a much more dynamic environment until relatively recently.
Mars is currently very cold and dry and its thin atmosphere makes liquid water at its surface
exceptionally rare. However, recent discoveries of extensive gully systems incised into slopes
suggest that they were carved by the flow of liquid water. Tjalling de Haas and colleagues
investigate a crater that has a maximum age of one million years and calculate the debris flow
size and the volumes of water that must have been present. They suggest that centimetres of
liquid water existed in the catchment areas resulting in frequent debris flows. The authors
think that the melting must have occurred in cyclical periods of warmer climate related to
changes in the planet’s orbit.
The results of the study imply that much larger volumes of snow and ice must have existed
within the catchment areas than previously imagined. They also suggest that Martian slopes
oriented like the one studied were extremely active environments, with Earth-like debris flow
frequencies in the geologically very recent past.
Video 1
A Dutch language video with English subtitles is available here:
https://vimeo.com/130884475
Credit: Jasmijn Snoijink 2015
Article and author details
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Earth-like aqueous debris-flow activity on Mars at high orbital
obliquity in the last million years
Corresponding Author
Tjalling de Haas
Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
Email: t.dehaas@uu.nl, Tel: +31 30 253 2778
DOI
10.1038/ncomms8543
Online paper*
http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/ncomms8543
* Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo
ends).