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Erosion, Deposition, and Weathering Across the Solar System, Volume Four summarizes erosional landforms across the Solar System, with an emphasis on the mechanistic processes responsible for these features, including case studies and methods of data and image analysis. Using comparative studies of planetary bodies and various Earth locations as natural laboratories to test models of erosive processes and landscape evolution, the book provides a current review of understanding of the evolution of planetary surfaces for Earth and those of our Solar System.
Planetary surfaces images across the Solar System reveal the ubiquity of erosional processes on planets, moons, and other bodies. From branching valley networks on Mars to hydrocarbon rivers on Titan to nitrogen glaciers on Pluto, landforms across the Solar System are conspicuously similar to features that we are familiar with on Earth. This familiarity suggests similar erosional processes are occurring across the Solar System despite drastically different surface conditions and material properties.
List of contents
1. Overview of Erosion across the Solar System and Grand Tour
2. Weathering and sediment production
3. Mass wasting
4. Fluvial processes
5. Shorelines and Deltas
6. Aeolian erosion and deposition
7. Glacial processes
8. Low-temperature ices: Erosion and Deposition
9. Modeling landscape evolution through time
10. Conclusions/Synthesis
About the author
Dr. Jani Radebaugh is a Professor of Geological Sciences at Brigham Young University, England. She studies landscape evolution in the Solar System with a focus on volcanic landforms and lava lake temperatures on Earth and Io, dune formation and evolution on Earth, Titan and Pluto and yardangs of Earth, Mars, Venus and Titan. She also studies landforms on Earth through field studies in the Sahara, Arabia, Australia, the Altiplano, Ethiopia and Antarctica.Dr. Alexander Morgan is a Research Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, Arizona. His research interests are focused on how flowing water has shaped the Martian surface. He uses remote sensing observations with numerical models to quantify the erosion of early Martian landscapes. He also conducts field work at sites that are morphologic, climatic, or lithologic analogues to Mars, including the Atacama Desert, northern Canada, and the Australian Outback.
