Whugga, whugga, whugga.... how long can you tre...

(Reply to "Burns cliff")

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Bill Harris

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PostPosted: November 5, 2004 2:35 PM 

Whugga, whugga, whugga.... how long can you tread water? Smile

The dunes are just that, dunes. Ripples need moving water and you aren't going to have that in the bottom of a 400' pond. There is no evidence of water in the crater, and nothing I've seen looks like a beach or terrace.

The wind blows across the plain,picks up fine material and transports it as "bedload", by saltation or in suspension. As it flows over the crater, velocity drops and so does so does the "sediment" load, which is deposited in the crater. There are some not-defined aerodynamics going on to sculpt the fines into n-th order dunes.

Aeolian erosion is clearly a force here. An aerial view of craters in the area show light-colored downwind tail to the SE, this material is likely abraded from the evaporite unit that forms the crater rims. I expected to see aeolian erosion on the face of Burns Cliff since it is facing the prevailing wind and the windborn material would tend to sandblast that exposed area.

The blueberries were formed in the evaporite beds as secondary features. As the evaporites are eroded by the wind, the modules are left behind and currently form a desert pavement which minimizes erosion.

One puzzler for me is the "landslide" areas visible on the slopes of Endurance-- the area around Wopmay is an example. My initial take was thay they are simply slump features where gravity is trying to get everything down to base level, but there is something "wrong" with that. I dunno what that is...

--Bill

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