An integrated model for dune morphology and sand fluxes on Mars
Abstract
The transport and deposition of sand is the most prevalent agent of landscape modification on Mars today, with fluxes comparable to some sand dunes on Earth. Until now, the relationship between sand flux and dune field morphology has been poorly constrained. By tracking dune movement over ∼10 km-long dune fields in Herschel Crater and Nili Patera, representative of many dune fields on Mars, we find a downwind flux decrease that correlates with a sequence of changing morphology from barchans to barchanoids and seifs (longitudinal dunes) to isolated dome dunes and ending with sand sheets. We show empirical consistency with atmospheric Internal Boundary Layer (IBL) theory which can describe these broad flux and morphology changes in Martian dune fields. Deviations from IBL flux predictions are from wind streamline compressions up slopes, leading to a speedup effect. By establishing a dune field morphology type example and correlating it with measured and predicted flux changes, we provide an integrated morphology and flux model that can be applied to other areas of Mars and be used to infer paleo-environmental conditions from preserved sandstone.
Additional Information
© 2016 Elsevier B.V. Received 4 April 2016; Received in revised form 23 September 2016; Accepted 29 September 2016; Available online 27 October 2016. N.T. Bridges and F. Ayoub were supported via NASA grant MDAP NNX12AJ41G, "Advanced Change Detection of Martian Dunes." Claire Newman was supported by NASA Mars Fundamental Research Program grant number NNX11AF59G and all simulations were performed on the NASA High End Computing Pleiades cluster at NASA Ames. K.D. Runyon is funded by the support of the APL Graduate Student Fellowship Program. The original remote sensing data are available online via the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) and at www.uahirise.org. The atmospheric circulation data, DEMs, and co-registered images are available upon request from the corresponding author. We gratefully acknowledge Kurt Aikens and Tasos Lyrintzis for helpful discussions regarding the panel method. We are grateful to Sarah Sutton for providing the DEMs as part of the HiRISE project. Helpful reviews from Ryan Ewing and Gary Kocurek greatly improved the quality of the manuscript. The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.Errata
The authors regret that some of the X and Y data were de-correlated in a Matlab script used to generate Fig.5a (top left pane). They confirm this is an isolated incident and does not change the discussion or conclusion of the paper, nor does it change the message of the figure. The corrected Fig.5appears below for the reader's convenience.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - mmc1.docx
Files
| Name | Size | Download all |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:5ba78ea32a2a8e492e20e8fef35866f6
|
1.0 MB | Download |
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 71651
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20161101-081946201
- NNX12AJ41G
- NASA
- NNX11AF59G
- NASA
- Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
- Created
-
2016-11-01Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2023-06-01Created from EPrint's last_modified field