Related papers: A lower-than-expected saltation threshold at Marti…
The impactor flux early in Mars history was much higher than today, so sedimentary sequences include many buried craters. In combination with models for the impactor flux, observations of the number of buried craters can constrain…
Motility is a ubiquitous feature of microbial life on Earth, and is widely regarded as a promising biosignature candidate. In the search for motile organisms, it is therefore valuable to have rough estimates for the number of such microbes…
A loosely packed bed of sand sits precariously on the fence between mechanically stable and flowing states. This has especially strong implications for animals or vehicles needing to navigate sandy environments, which can sink and become…
Surface modification on Jupiter's volcanically active moon, Io, has to date been attributed almost exclusively to lava emplacement and volcanic plume deposits. Here we demonstrate that wind-blown transport of sediment may also be altering…
A planetesimal moves through the gas of its protoplanetary disc where it experiences a head wind. Though the ambient pressure is low, this wind can erode and ultimately destroy the planetesimal if the flow is strong enough. For the first…
Close to the onset of Aeolian particle transport through saltation we find in wind tunnel experiments a regime of discontinuous flux characterized by bursts of activity. Scaling laws are observed in the time delay between each burst and in…
As we continue to discover terrestrial exoplanets, many with orbital and planetary characteristics drastically different from anything encountered in our solar system, we are likely to encounter 'exotic' atmospheric transport processes. As…
Global dust storms are the most thermodynamically significant dust events on Mars. They are produced from the combination of multiple local and regional lifting events and maintained by positive radiative-dynamic feedbacks. The most recent…
Ancient sediments provide archives of climate and habitability on Mars. Gale Crater, the landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), hosts a 5 km high sedimentary mound. Hypotheses for mound formation include evaporitic, lacustrine,…
Wind-driven sand transport generates atmospheric dust, forms dunes, and sculpts landscapes. However, it remains unclear how the sand flux scales with wind speed, largely because models do not agree on how particle speed changes with wind…
The transport of solid particles by a fluid flow is frequently found in nature and industry. Some examples are the transport of sand in rivers and hydrocarbon pipelines. When the shear stresses exerted by a fluid flow on a granular bed…
We present a new database of $>$300 layer-orientations from sedimentary mounds on Mars. These layer orientations, together with draped landslides, and draping of rocks over differentially-eroded paleo-domes, indicate that for the…
Regolith on Mars exchanges water with the atmosphere on a diurnal basis and this process causes significant variation in the abundance of water vapor at the surface. While previous studies of regolith-atmosphere exchange focus on the…
The mesoscale structure of aeolian sand transport determines a variety of natural phenomena studied in planetary and Earth science. We analyze it theoretically beyond the mean-field level, based on the grain-scale transport kinetics and…
Sediment transport along the surface drives geophysical phenomena as diverse as wind erosion and dune formation. The main length-scale controlling the dynamics of sediment erosion and deposition is the saturation length $L_\mathrm{s}$,…
Atmospheric mass loss is thought to have strongly shaped the sample of close-in exoplanets. These atmospheres should be lost isotropically, leading to no net migration on the planetary orbit. However, strong stellar winds can funnel the…
Mars' sedimentary rocks record Gyrs of environmental change. New data enable the first global analysis of paleo-environment relevant physical properties of these rocks, including layer thickness and accumulation rate. We find that layer…
We investigate the airborne transport of particles on a granular surface by the saltation mechanism through numerical simulation of particle motion coupled with turbulent flow. We determine the saturated flux $q_{s}$ and show that its…
Post-Noachian Martian paleochannels indicate the existence of liquid water on the surface of Mars after about 3.5 Gya (Irwin et al., 2015; Palucis et al., 2016). In order to explore the effects of variations in CO$_{2}$ partial pressure and…
Terraforming Mars can be evaluated with a set of system-level constraints linking (i) target pressures & compositions to required atmospheric inventories, (ii) target surface temperatures to the required radiative control, (iii) inventories…