Dynamics of recent landslides (<20 My) on Mars: Insights from high-resolution topography on Earth and Mars and numerical modelling
Introduction
Large landslides were first observed on Mars in 1972 by the Mariner 9 probe, in Valles Marineris (Sharp, 1973). This region is characterised by a succession of steep-sided canyons, trending East-West over ~4000 km (Quantin et al., 2004a; Lucas et al., 2011; Brunetti et al., 2014; Watkins et al., 2015), with more than 1400 landslides (Crosta et al., 2018) formed between Hesperian (3.5 Ga) and Late Amazonian (50 Ma) (Quantin et al., 2004b). Several studies have investigated the morphology of the large landslides in Valles Marineris (Lucchitta, 1979; Quantin et al., 2004a; Soukhovitskaya and Manga, 2006; Brunetti et al., 2014; Crosta et al., 2018), which are characterised by scarps up to several kilometres wide and kilometre-deep, broad fan-shaped deposits, often wider than the scars from which they originated. The role that water may have played in these landslides is the main preocupation of these previous works and is important to understand because these landslides have occurred throughout Hesperian to Late Amazonian epochs so can provide information on Mars’ climate through time. Mass movements can also give information on the tectonic history of a planetary body (Quantin et al., 2004b). The majority of previous studies of martian landslides have examined landslides with volumes greater than 1010 m3, which is larger than landslides most commonly found on Earth. This lack of a direct terrestrial analogue is one of the reasons that the triggering and dynamics of these large landslides is still a subject of active research and the role of water and/or active tectonics is unclear.
To our knowledge, no studies have specifically focussed on understanding ‘small’ martian landslides with a volume less than 1010 m3, which have a similar scale to landslides that can be found on Earth. These common terrestrial landslides are well-studied and their formation mechanisms are better understood than that of their larger counterparts. This provides an opportunity to perform a comparative morphological study between terrestrial analogues and martian landslides without the need for scaling. We selected three relatively fresh, recent martian landslides (with potentially contrasting formation mechanisms), with the least influence of secondary processes on their surfaces (e.g., impact craters, aeolian features) and topographic data available, in order to increase the reliability and robustness of the comparative study. By identifying similar morphologies in the martian landslides and in terrestrial analogues, whose formation process is known, we can infer the processes that may have been at work on Mars.
In addition to this comparative morphological study, we use the thin-layer numerical code SHALTOP to simulate the landslide dynamics, assuming it is a dry granular flow. In spite of their simplifying assumptions and the uncertainty on initial and boundary conditions (see Section 2.3, and Delannay et al., 2017), thin-layer numerical models have previously been successful in reproducing the runout and approximate deposit morphology for a wide range of landslides on Earth and Mars. Using seismic data to reconstruct the dynamics of some terrestrial landslides, it was shown that thin-layer models can also reproduce these dynamics (Moretti et al., 2012, 2020; Levy et al., 2015; Yamada et al., 2016, 2018).
We therefore employ a double approach, using both morphological and numerical methods, to better constrain the mechanism of formation of these ‘small’ martian landslides and to understand their dynamics and hence, the potential role of liquid water and/or active tectonics.
First, in Section 2, we describe the data and the methods used to carry out this study, including the morphological analysis, age-estimation using crater size-frequency analysis and the numerical model used to carry out the simulations. In Section 3, we present the results from the morphological analysis, age estimation and numerical simulations. In Section 4 we first compare our results with those for other martian landslides presented in the literature, then discuss the potential emplacement mechanisms of the martian landslides and finally we assess the likelihood of the different hypotheses that could explain the formation of these three martian landslides.
Section snippets
Methodology
In this section, we elaborate the data and methods used to carry out the geomorphological analyses of the martian and terrestrial landslides. We also describe the crater counting method used to estimate the age of formation of martian landslides and then the method used to perform the numerical modelling.
Results
In this section we present the geomorphological results (Section 3.1), the age estimates (Section 3.2) and numerical modelling (Section 3.3). Section 3.1 is divided into two parts, the first concerning the description of the results for the martian landslides followed by a comparison to the terrestrial landslides.
Discussion
In the following sections, we will first discuss how the investigated landslides compare to other martian and terrestrial landslides, and then their likely emplacement mechanisms suggested by our geomorphic observations and numerical modelling. Finally, we propose different scenarios that could have led to the formation of these landslides.
Conclusions
We have studied three martian landslides using high-resolution images and digital elevation models, comparison with Earth analogues and numerical simulations. The aim is to deduce hypotheses of landslide formation on Mars where in situ analysis is generally not possible. Our results show the importance of using morphological comparison between martian and terrestrial landslides to identify key morphologies, combined with numerical modelling.
We estimate that these landslides are all very recent,
Author statement
A. Guimpier: Conceptualisation, Investigation, Writing – Original Draft; S. J. Conway: Conceptualisation, Supervision, Writing – Reviewing & Editing; A. Mangeney: Methodology, Supervision, Writing – Reviewing & Editing; A. Lucas: Resources, Writing – Reviewing & Editing; N. Mangold: Supervision, Writing – Reviewing & Editing; M. Peruzzetto: Software, Validation, Writing – Reviewing & Editing; M. Pajola: Writing – Reviewing & Editing; A. Lucchetti: Writing – Reviewing & Editing; G. Munaretto:
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to G. Stucky de Quay and another anonymous reviewer for improving the quality of the manuscript with their helpful feedback. We are also grateful to the editor A. Pio Rossi for his comments. S.J. Conway, N. Mangold and A. Guimpier are grateful for the support of the Programme National de Planétologie (PNP), the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the Groupement de Recherche Ecoulements Gravitaires et RIsques Naturels (EGRIN) and A. Mangeney for the ERC contract,
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2022, IcarusCitation Excerpt :The details for each acquisition are presented in Table 1, the original imagery dataset can be downloaded from www.uahirise.org/PSP_005701_1920 and www.uahirise.org/ESP_050033_1920, while the resulting anaglyph is presented in Supplementary Material Fig SM1. The slightly different observing conditions (both illumination and geometry of the acquisitions) of the two images provided the possibility to prepare a DEM of the landslide through the Ames Stereo Pipeline (Moratto et al., 2010) with a spatial resolution of 2 m (Guimpier et al., 2021), Fig. 1D. This product has been vertically controlled to ESA's Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC, Neukum and Jaumann, 2004) publicly available DEMs.