Active Landslide Erosion of Mars’ North Polar Cliffs: Current Rates, Causes, and Implications

While the North Polar Layered Deposits (NPLD) have long been considered Mars’ best climate record, only recently have some of the processes governing the evolution of the NPLD to their current form been discovered and even directly observed. MOC revealed outcrops of an interbedded ice and dark-sand “basal unit” (BU) below steep NPLD scarps. Some bright markings on the BU were suggested to be talus deposits of mass-wasted NPLD ice, caused by undercutting via removal of easily erodible BU sand. In previous work with HiRISE images that confirmed the origin of these deposits, we: detailed their meter-scale morphology, constituent features, and variability; identified fractures of BU ice layers and NPLD scarps as additional mass-wasting facilitators; and, based on inter- and inter-annual monitoring, discovered that new deposits appear over time, thereby establishing mass wasting (of both BU and NPLD ice) as a currently active process.

Here, we advance from qualitative descriptions of new, active processes to quantification of the rates at which they are occurring. From ~4 years of HiRISE observations, we cataloged the location, volume, source, and timing constraints of >160 landslide events along ~ 20 km of BU-NPLD scarp. Average rates are ~44 events/yr and ~2000 m3/yr, although 7 large events account for ~3/4 of the volume; this is a very geologically dynamic environment. BU events are more frequent and smaller than NPLD events, reflecting the relative thickness of ice source deposits but also perhaps differing proportions of two causal mechanisms: sand-removal undercutting and thermal-stress induced expansion, contraction, and fracturing. BU events prefer summer over spring; NPLD events strongly prefer fall-winter over spring-summer. We compare this observational data with 1) thermal stress models of the ice scarp to assess consistency in timing of activity, and 2) sublimation models of the ice scarp to assess the relative contributions to scarp retreat - our preliminary mass-wasting estimate is ~2.5 mm/yr. The value in developing such rate estimates is the potential to consider time scales in exploring aspects of large-scale north polar landscape evolution (e.g., retreating cap edges, the growth of proto-Chasma Boreale, etc.) and the release of water to the atmosphere.