The freshest outflow channel, Floods in Athabasca Valles Options

[SigurRosFan]

Release date: April 03, 2006

- http://themis.asu.edu/features/athabascafloods

---
Based on the counts, however, the valley is between 2 million and 30 million years old. If true, that makes it the youngest outflow channel on Mars.

Estimates of the volume range from 10,000 to 10 million cubic meters per second. For comparison, the Mississippi River's flow averages 17,000 cubic meters per second.
---

Athabasca Valles and Cerberus Fossae are one of my interesting places on Mars. I'm searching for images of this rootless cinder cones in the valley.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

What is much astonishing too is that there was lava AND water flowing out from the same hole. As if the marsian volcanoes had water as a common type of eruption. On Earth we don't have water volcanoes, but we have mud volcanoes which could create flow traces. But usually the mud is too thick to give flow traces like Athabasca. And anyway mud volcanoes are very generally not connected to lava volcanoes. There are some exception though, but of small size.

Massive water floods on mars are generaly explained as the merting of large underground ice bodies or watertable. Eventually the eruptions would be driven by dissolved gasses. But I wonder if there would not be on Mars mantellic water. We know on Earth that there is a small percentage of water in the mantle (add to this that some volcanoes are fed with marine sediments soaked with water). So most lavas contain water mixed in, a fact which is possible due to the very high pressure into the depths of the Earth. When a mixture of water and lava comes near the surface, usually the separation occurs during the eruption, giving violent explosions. In some case it is a mixture of steam and dust which erupts.

Would not be possible that, on Mars, the separation could take place much deeper, when the lava gets solidified into deep magma chambers? If this could happen, it would give a subterannean body of hot water. With a connection to lava volcanoes.

But if so, this hot water (300-500°C) would boil when erupting, lefting only a residue of cold water. The vent would look like a maar (crater without a cone, formed by some explosive eruptions). A large part of the eruption would give a temporary atmosphere to Mars, with rain and snow everywhere on the planet. As I explained in another thread, this would explain the large flow channels in the southern highlands, as well as the small gullies seen on many slopes.