Publication Date:
2008-05-24
Description:
Amphitheater-headed canyons have been used as diagnostic indicators of erosion by groundwater seepage, which has important implications for landscape evolution on Earth and astrobiology on Mars. Of perhaps any canyon studied, Box Canyon, Idaho, most strongly meets the proposed morphologic criteria for groundwater sapping because it is incised into a basaltic plain with no drainage network upstream, and approximately 10 cubic meters per second of seepage emanates from its vertical headwall. However, sediment transport constraints, 4He and 14C dates, plunge pools, and scoured rock indicate that a megaflood (greater than 220 cubic meters per second) carved the canyon about 45,000 years ago. These results add to a growing recognition of Quaternary catastrophic flooding in the American northwest, and may imply that similar features on Mars also formed by floods rather than seepage erosion.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Lamb, Michael P -- Dietrich, William E -- Aciego, Sarah M -- Depaolo, Donald J -- Manga, Michael -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2008 May 23;320(5879):1067-70. doi: 10.1126/science.1156630.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-4768, USA. mpl@berkeley.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18497296" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Disasters
;
Geography
;
*Geologic Sediments
;
Idaho
;
*Mars
;
Time
;
*Water
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
Permalink