Using quantitative topographic analysis to understand the role of water on transport and deposition processes on crater walls.

摘要

The amount of water runoff need to evolve landscapes is rarely assessed. Empirical studies correlate erosion rate to runoff or mean annual precipitation, but rarely is the full history of a landscape known such that it is possible to assess how much water was required to produce it. While this may not seem to be of primary importance on Earth where water is commonly plentiful, on Mars the amount of water to drive landscape evolution is a key question. Here we tackle this question through a series of five chapters, one devoted to field work at Meteor Crater, another to laboratory experiments about controlling processes, and then two chapters on analysis of landforms and implications of water runoff on Mars (associated with the Mars Science Laboratory mission to Gale Crater), and then we complete this effort with a consideration of how we can reliably assign relative timing between events resulting in small depositional features. What follows below is a summary of what is found in each chapter.;Meteor Crater, a 4.5 km2 impact crater that formed ∼50,000 years ago in northern Arizona, has prominent gully features on its steep walls that appear similar to some gullies found on Mars. At the crater bottom, there are over 30 meters of lake sediments from a lake that disappeared ∼10,000 to 11,000 years ago, indicating the transition from the Pleistocene to the current, drier climate. A combination of fieldwork, cosmogenic dating, and topographic analysis of LiDAR data show that debris flows, not seepage erosion and fluvial processes as previously suggested in the literature, drove gully incision during their formation period of ∼40,000 years before the onset of the Holocene. Runoff from bare bedrock source areas high on the crater wall cut into lower debris mantled slopes, where the runoff bulked up and transformed into debris flows that carried boulders down to ∼5 to 8 degree slopes, leaving distinct boulder lined levees and lobate tongues of terminal debris deposits that crisscrossed on the lower slopes. We hypothesize that the fine material, likely generated in the impact, and deposited with the coarse debris on the lower portion of the crater wall, is key to this bulking up process as flows cut across the deposits. Fluvial processes following the debris flow gullies extended alluvial deposits to the crater floor and contributed to lake infilling. Cosmogenic dating confirms that most of the modification of the crater walls occurred before the early Holocene. To account for the 75 distinct deposits currently lying on the crater floor, debris flow frequency would be about 1 event every 17 years, assuming debris flow activity terminated ∼10,000 years ago. Assuming a water-to-rock ratio of 0.2 at the time of transport, it would have taken ∼100,000 m3 of water to transport the ∼500,000 m3 of debris flow deposits on the crater floor. Given the 4.5 km2 size of the crater, this extensive erosion would require less than 0.02 m of total runoff, or the equivalent of just 0.001 mm/year over a 40,000 year period. This insignificant amount of water was likely packaged into short-lived storm or snow-melt events when debris flows were generated. Much more runoff did occur, as evidenced by the lake and fluvial deposits, as well as the likely cool, wet conditions of the late Pleistocene. This suggests only a small fraction of the total runoff is needed to do considerable geomorphic evolution, producing strongly gully-scared crater walls. Currently, only minor fluvial modification of the gully networks occurs. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).