Presenters-0684
From CSDMS
CSDMS 2025: Exploring Earth's Surface with Models, Data & AI
Global flood volumes on Mars: insights into a persisting water cycle
Abstract
Ancient Mars maintained an active water cycle. Low-lying impact craters gathered water from precipitation, thereby forming lakes. When water levels surpassed the crater rim topography, these lakes could breach and trigger floods that released large volumes of high-energy water, sculpting vast canyons that are ubiquitous on Mars. In fact, past work has shown that these floods eroded a quarter of the erosional volumes of the Martian surface. However, the persistence of flow from these lakes after their breaching floods remains uncertain. Here, we use a semi-automated workflow to estimate the flood volumes released for 200 lake systems. We then developed an Earth-based theoretical erosion framework to estimate the amount of water that continued to flow from each lake after the floods occurred, using simple topographic metrics such as channel volume, slope, and length. Results from this work provide new quantitative constraints on the volume and persistence of subsequent water flow after flood events, deepening our understanding of Mars' early climate, hydrology, and past habitability.
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