Venusian Channel Formation As A Subsurface Process Options

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

There's a new and interesting preprint at JGR-Planets in Press:

Lang, Nicholas P.; Hansen, Vicki L. — January 2006
Venusian channel formation as a subsurface process
(2005JE002629)
PDF [8.7 Mb]

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Michael Carr has quite a bit on this subject in his extremely useful 1995 book "Water on Mars" (which I recommend to non-scientists as well as scientists -- it's thorough but remarkably easy to understand). He was a major proponent of sapping at the time, and I believe still is. The question is whether the extreme shortage of visible tributaries in the Martian valley networks is due to an actual original lack of them -- as would be the case from sapping -- or whether the erosion and aeolian soil movement that's gone on in the billions of years since then has just covered up a lot of the initial little tributaries that you'd get from surface runoff. (This is one reason why a Martian SAR orbiter would still be useful scientifically to punch through the upper few meters of loose soil.)