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Martian landscapes of fluvial ridges carved from ancient sedimentary basin fill

Nature Geoscience volume 15, pages 871–877 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Large sedimentary basins contain archives of Earth history. It is unknown to what extent similar basins existed on Mars because there are few observations relating to the subsurface and it is difficult to identify buried deposits. Here, we used numerical simulations to show that landscapes of networks of topographic ridges that are abundant on the surface of Mars may represent erosional windows into thick, basin-filling river deposits that accumulated over long time spans. We used a numerical model to drive hillslope creep and differential erosion from the wind to simulate Mars-like exhumation processes acting on basin-filling fluvial strata, which we based on those buried in the Gulf of Mexico on Earth, as imaged using three-dimensional reflectance seismology. Simulations produced remarkably Martian landscapes in which the preferential erosion of mudstone relative to sandstone channel belts leads to the development of complex patterns of intersecting ridges. Our findings contrast to the existing view of ridged Martian landscapes as thin-skinned surface deposits preserving fluvial landscapes at a snapshot in time. Instead, the ridge cross-cutting patterns produced by the model reflect the exhumation of channel bodies at different stratigraphic levels, exposing basin strata accumulated over time scales of 500,000 years. Thus, we propose that fluvial ridges on Mars may expose an archive of long-lived aqueous processes.

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Fig. 1: Fluvial ridges and sandstone cliffs on Mars.
Fig. 2: Horizontal slices showing river channel belts in the 3D seismic volume.
Fig. 3: Hillshade maps showing the evolution of fluvial ridges.
Fig. 4: Synthetic landscapes and difference maps from the three experiments.

Data availability

The 3D seismic volume used to generate the experimental results is available in Caltech’s Research Data Repository74.

Code availability

The numerical model used in the experiments is available in Caltech’s Research Data Repository74.

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Acknowledgements

Funding for this study was provided in part by NASA grant NNX16AQ81G awarded to M.P.L. We thank the Mars Science Laboratory mission for support and J. Dickson for technical assistance in Caltech’s Murray Lab for Planetary Visualization.

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Author notes

  1. Benjamin T. Cardenas

    Present address: Department of Geosciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Benjamin T. Cardenas, Michael P. Lamb & John P. Grotzinger

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Contributions

B.T.C. and M.P.L. conceived the work and applied the methodology. All authors contributed to the analysis, writing, reviewing and editing.

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Correspondence to Benjamin T. Cardenas.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Joel Davis and Nicolas Mangold for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: Tamara Goldin and James Super, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Location maps of the seismic volume used in the experiment.

A: Box shows the location of seismic volume B-11-91-LA relative to the Gulf of Mexico, Earth. B: Zoom in to the box in A, showing the full extent of the 3D seismic survey (gray area) and the subsection used in the experiments (black area).

Extended Data Fig. 2 The distribution of Ω.

Histogram showing the distribution of the dimensionless sweetness of the full seismic volume.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Evolution of topographic relief in each experiment relative to the erosion at the central pixel.

The standard deviation of elevation generated during experiments 1 (99% wind-driven, 1% hillslope creep), 2 (75% wind-driven, 25% hillslope creep), and 3 (55% wind-driven, 45% hillslope creep). The experiments with less topographic variability evolved fewer fluvial ridges. Comparisons in Fig. 4 were performed when all experiments eroded the central pixel by 116 m, the value at the end of this plot.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1 and 2.

Supplementary Video 1

Animation showing the evolution of the synthetic landscape during experiment 1.

Supplementary Video 2

Animation showing the evolution of the synthetic landscape during experiment 2.

Supplementary Video 3

Animation showing the evolution of the synthetic landscape during experiment 3.

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Cardenas, B.T., Lamb, M.P. & Grotzinger, J.P. Martian landscapes of fluvial ridges carved from ancient sedimentary basin fill. Nat. Geosci. 15, 871–877 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01058-2

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