Fluvial Depositional Systems of the African Humid Period: An Analog for an Early, Wet Mars in the Eastern Sahara

Abstract

A widely hypothesized but complex transition from widespread fluvial activity to predominantly aeolian processes is inferred on Mars based on remote sensing data observations of ancient landforms. However, the lack of analysis of in situ martian fluvial deposits hinders our understanding of the flow regime nature and sustainability of the martian fluvial activity and the hunt for ancient life. Studying analogs from arid zones on Earth is fundamental to quantitatively understanding geomorphic processes and climate drivers that might have dominated during early Mars. Here we investigate the formation and preservation of fluvial depositional systems in the eastern Sahara, where the largest arid region on Earth hosts important repositories of past climatic changes. The fluvial systems are composed of well-preserved single-thread sinuous to branching ridges and fan-shaped deposits interpreted as deltas. The systems' configuration and sedimentary content suggest that ephemeral rivers carved these landforms by sequential intermittent episodes of erosion and deposition active for 10-100s years over ∼10,000 years during the late Quaternary. Subsequently, these landforms were sculpted by a marginal role of rainfall and aeolian processes with minimum erosion rates of 1.1 ± 0.2 mm/yr, supplying ∼96 ± 24 × 10 10 m 3 of disaggregated sediment to adjacent aeolian dunes. Our results imply that similar martian fluvial systems preserving single-thread, short distance source-to-sink courses may have formed due to transient drainage networks active over short durations. Altogether, this study adds to the growing recognition of the complexity of interpreting climate history from orbital images of landforms.Plain Language Summary Mars is currently a dry and cold desert, but rivers preserved in inverted topography suggest that water once flowed during its early history. However, how sustained and how frequently these rivers flowed remains uncertain. Here we study ancient fluvial systems (rivers and deltas) from the eastern Sahara that formed during the late Quaternary, in much wetter conditions than those prevailing today in this desert and which bear striking analogies to martian systems. We find that rivers and deltas, now preserved as ridges, record short distance source-to-sink high-energy systems formed due to heavy rainfall events. Our observations and measurements of the meandering systems within the deltaic features suggest that such wet conditions might have spanned tens to a few hundred years over a total duration of ∼10,000 years. Since the wet conditions ceased, arid conditions prevailed, and the aeolian processes resumed, sculpting ridges out of ancient channels. Our results imply that martian fluvial systems may have been associated with similar local and heavy runoff conditions that lasted 10-100s years over thousands of years, possibly sufficient to support habitability. A shift toward arid environments led to the sculpting of fluvial ridges and the widespread formation of dunes across the modern martian landscape.

Prolonged Record of Hydroclimatic Changes at Antoniadi Crater, Mars

“…However, most of the paleo-river landforms within Antoniadi crater are eroded systems, leaving what used to be the river bed standing as elevated ridges in the present-day landscape (e.g., Zaki et al, 2021). Previous work in terrestrial environments estimated that discharge calculations based on the width of the fluvial ridge are a factor of 1-20 greater than that inferred from slope and grain size information (e.g., Hayden et al, 2019;Hayden, Lamb, & Carney, 2021;Williams et al, 2009;Zaki et al, 2022). Despite the marked uncertainties involved in using these approaches, it is more feasible to quantify flow discharge rates on Mars using the former methodology, primarily because of the difficulty in measuring grain size and channel thickness from the available data (Kite et al, 2019).…”