Abstract
AbstractMartian gullies are widespread landforms in the mid-latitudes of Mars. When the first reports of these kilometre-scale features were published in 2000, they were controversially hailed as a sign of recent flows of liquid water on the surface of Mars. This supposition was contrary to our understanding of recent environmental conditions on Mars, under which water should not exist in its liquid form. In response to their discovery, researchers proposed a wide range of scenarios to explain this apparent paradox, including scenarios driven by CO2, climate change or the presence of a liquid water aquifer. This Special Publication is a collection of papers arising from the topics discussed at the Second International Workshop on Martian Gullies held at the Geological Society, London. A review paper opens the Special Publication and thereafter the papers are presented under three themes: Martian remote sensing, Earth analogues and laboratory simulations. This Special Publication establishes the state of the art in Martian gully research, presents the latest observations and interpretations of the present-day activity and long-term evolution of Martian gullies, explores the role of Earth analogues, highlights novel experimental work and identifies future avenues of research. The importance of gullies as a potential marker of habitable environments on Mars underlines their importance in framing space exploration programmes.
Highlights
This Special Publication came together as a result of the Second International Workshop on Martian Gullies, entitled ‘Martian Gullies and their Earth Analogues’, held at the Geological Society in London during the Geological Society’s Year of Water
The Earth analogues presented at the workshop and included in this Special Publication include Antarctic water flows in Victoria Land (Hauber et al 2018) and the McMurdo Dry Valleys (Dickson et al 2017) and Himalayan debris flows generated by snowmelt (Sinha et al 2018)
This Special Publication contains a cross-section of the latest work on Martian gullies
Summary
This is the longest section of the Special Publication and is representative of the approaches used in the community studying Martian gullies. The latest results on the present-day activity of Martian gullies, including constraints on the timing and frequency of activity, are covered by four papers (Dundas et al 2017; Diniega et al 2017; Jouannic et al 2018; Pasquon et al 2018). Dundas et al (2017) present an overview of gully activity and posit that CO2 sublimation processes drive present-day activity. The other three papers focus on the activity of gullies on dunes on Mars. This activity is shown to be annual and seasonal and is probably linked to the action of CO2, but with the possibility of water action
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