Nature of Victoria's dark streaks, swept clean, deposited, or other? Options

[dvandorn]

Now that we're finally about to do a detailed inspection of the darkest of the dark streaks emanating from the north-northeast portion of the crater rim, it's time for final speculations before we know the truth of the matter.

I'm in the clean-sweep camp. The large-scale orbital observations make these streaks appear almost definitely of aeolian origin -- the manner in which the streaks feather along the edges, and the way in which they curve off as they extend out from the crater, are all consistent with wind/ground interactions.

Observations of the lighter, western streak seem to show more visible concretions right up on the surface. If this holds true of the darker streak, I think that proves the clean-sweep theory.

Think of it this way -- if you packed pebbles and dry dust as a pavement and then let the wind strip away at this surface, the dust would blow off and the pebbles would remain. What dust remained would sit in the lee of the pebbles.

This seems to be exactly what we're seeing in the first dark streak -- the lighter soil component has been blown away entirely, and the darker component (probably eroded concretion material) has been mostly blown away but its remnants sit in the lee of the concretions.

I would expect that any depositional streak would appear as dust or fine-grained soils which cover over the materials we see on the surface outside of the streaks. That's *not* what we're seeing.

In addition, I'd have to treat any suggestion that the blueberries themselves are being blown out of the crater to form the streaks with an awful lot of skepticism. Martian winds aren't strong enough to move the relatively large-and-heavy concretions along level ground -- it would be absolutely impossible for these thin-air winds to have blown them entirely out of the crater and up to a crater diameter's distance away.

Now, if the MIs in the darker streak show that dark dust is consistently filleted on the upwind side of the concretions, and shadowed with less dust downwind of the concretions, *that* would be an indication that the streaks are depositional. But, so far, that's not what we're seeing.

-the other Doug