Where are Mars’ Hypothesized Ocean Shorelines? Large Lateral and Topographic Offsets Between Different Versions of Paleoshoreline Maps

Abstract

Mars’ controversial hypothesized ocean shorelines have been found to deviate significantly from an expected equipotential surface. While multiple deformation models have been proposed to explain the wide range of elevations, here we show that the historical locations used in the literature and in these models vary widely. We find that the most commonly used version of the Arabia Level does not follow the originally described contact and can deviate laterally by ∼500 km in Deuteronilus Mensae. A meta-analysis of different published maps shows that, globally, the minimum lateral offsets between the locations of the putative Arabia and Deuteronilus shorelines vary by an average of 141 ± 142 km and 180 ± 177 km, respectively. This leads to mean elevations of the Arabia Level that vary by up to 2.2 km between different mappings, and topographic ranges within each global mapping ranging from 2.7 to 7.7 km. The younger Deuteronilus Level has less topographic variation as it largely follows a formal contact (the Vastitas Borealis Formation) within the relatively flat northern plains. Given the high variance in position (spatial and topographic) of the maps, the use of such data and conclusions based on them are potentially problematic.