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Mars Gullies: Spilling the Goods
The pictures are clear from high-flying spacecraft circling Mars - geologically recent gully features on the red planet. But there’s still intense debate about what forms them - blasts of carbon dioxide, melting ground ice in the upper few meters of the martian soil, dry landslides, even surface snowmelt?
But these are the “least likely†to describe the formation of the martian gullies, according to research published in the June 2007 issue of Icarus - the planetary space science journal.
The Mars gullies are caused by interior processes involving subsurface fluid processes - output from shallow and deep aquifers.
That’s the view from a team of experts reporting their observations in Icarus, led by Jennifer Heldmann of NASA’s Ames Research Center. Although some discrepancies still exist between prediction and observation, they note, the shallow and deep aquifer models remain as the most plausible theories.
Furthermore, the team’s findings that focused on Mars’ northern hemisphere are in general agreement with analyses of gullies in the red planet’s southern hemisphere.
The pictures are clear from high-flying spacecraft circling Mars - geologically recent gully features on the red planet. But there’s still intense debate about what forms them - blasts of carbon dioxide, melting ground ice in the upper few meters of the martian soil, dry landslides, even surface snowmelt?
But these are the “least likely†to describe the formation of the martian gullies, according to research published in the June 2007 issue of Icarus - the planetary space science journal.
The Mars gullies are caused by interior processes involving subsurface fluid processes - output from shallow and deep aquifers.
That’s the view from a team of experts reporting their observations in Icarus, led by Jennifer Heldmann of NASA’s Ames Research Center. Although some discrepancies still exist between prediction and observation, they note, the shallow and deep aquifer models remain as the most plausible theories.
Furthermore, the team’s findings that focused on Mars’ northern hemisphere are in general agreement with analyses of gullies in the red planet’s southern hemisphere.