What role did Tharsis formation during the Noachian/Hesperian period (3.8 – 3.5 Ga) have on the erosional history of Mars?

Abstract

On Earth, the characteristics of fluvial erosion depends on two main parameters: climate (rain fall) and tectonic history. Mars is a planet that experienced erosion driven by liquid water but its geodynamics are vastly different from Earth’s. Mars therefore represents a unique opportunity to understand how landscape evolution differs on a planet with a “stagnant lid” tectonic regime. The formation of Tharsis dome, a vast volcanic province, during the early history of Mars represented a major magmato-tectonic upheaval for the planet. Over several hundreds of million years, the Tharsis region experienced large scale magmatic intrusions, crustal deformation and effusive volcanism resulting in crustal growth, dynamic uplift and true polar wander (TPW) that accounts for the present location of the Tharsis dome at the equator. This event occurred during a time when Mars had an active water cycle, although the total mass and relative proportion of ice, liquid water and vapor is not well constrained. The uplift and subsequent true polar wander of Mars have affected drainage systems across the planet with many being abandoned or modified due to the variable uplift or subsidence as a lithospheric response to the regional upheaval in the Tharsis region (load on the elastic lithosphere) and TPW. Here we present results from numerical simulations performed using a stream power law algorithm on Mars during the Noachian/Hesperian growth of Tharsis to assess how the patterns of erosion rate are affected by the distribution of atmospheric moisture and flow routing in an attempt to reproduce the observed distribution of valley networks and their geometry. For this, we adapted and used the fully-implicit and O(n)-complexity FastScape algorithm to perform the simulation at the planetary scale. The aims of this work are to quantify the effect of Tharsis dome formation on fluvial systems during the Noachian and early Hesperian, and to establish a first-order erosion rate for this period. This study could help to constrain how much water was cycling on Mars at this time.