New insights on the runout of large landslides in the Valles-Marineris canyons, Mars

Abstract

Analogy with lab-scale dry granular flow experiments demonstrates that runouts and deposits heights of Valles-Marineris (VM) landslides can be scaled on a curve varying primarily with the initial aspect ratio of the mobilized rock mass (before slope failure). This results suggests both that any interstitial fluid played a negligible part in the VM landslides dynamics and that mobility is not an appropriate tool to characterize their dynamics. Copyright 2006 by the American Geophysical Union.