A paper entitled “Modeling the Hydrodynamics, Sediment Transport, and Valley Incision of Outlet-Forming Floods From Martian Crater Lakes” by Caleb Fassett (ST13) and Tim Goudge (UT-Austin) was published in JGR-Planets on 11/8/21. The paper examines crater lakes on ancient Mars that filled with water and breached their confining topography to form an outlet valley. Such floods are similar to those from dam failures on Earth; water stored in the lake and perched above surrounding topography has substantial stored energy. For this study, sediment transport routines were developed and added to an existing hydrodynamic model to study the outlet formation process. The results indicate that the size of lakes and their topographic setting were both important factors in controlling the erosion of their outlets. The work was supported by the Mars Data Analysis program.
Read the paper at: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2021JE006979.
