The Pace of Fluvial Meanders on Mars and Implications for the Western Delta Deposits of Jezero Crater
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Although there is little doubt that rivers once flowed on Mars' surface, how sustained and frequent their flows were remains enigmatic. Understanding the hydrology of early Mars, nonetheless, is a prerequisite to resolving the planet's climate history and the astrobiological potential of various ancient putative ecosystems. In 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover will attempt to land near ancient fluviodeltaic deposits in Jezero crater. Deltas offer enhanced organic‐matter burial and preservation on Earth but translating this notion to early Martian environments remains speculative in the absence of information on flow intermittency and sedimentation rates. Here we develop a new model to infer the lateral migration rate of Martian river meanders, which, combined with orbiter‐based observations of the fluviodeltaic deposits at Jezero crater, allows us to determine a minimum timescale for the formation of its delta. We then independently constrain the total duration of delta formation, including dry spells. Our best estimates suggest that delta formation spanned ~19–37 years over a total duration of ~380,000 years, i.e., that rivers flowed for a minimum ~1 sol/15–30 Martian years and conceivably more frequently, but uncertainties on total duration are large. Despite a possibly arid climate, predicted sedimentation rates are high, suggesting a rapid burial of putative organics in distal deposits. Altogether, our results support Jezero crater's potential as a prime target to look for ancient Martian life and acquire samples to return to Earth. Any discrepancies between our predictions of the deposits' grain‐to‐bedform‐scale architecture and future rover observations will shed critical light onto Mars' early surface environments.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it