Hypotheses for the water and metal fluxes to the rippled Amapari Marker Band, Gale Crater, Mars

Creators: Kite, E. S.¹; Gasda, P.²; Tino, C. J.³; Weitz, C.⁴; Thompson, L.⁵; Tutolo, B. M.³; Mondro, C.A.⁶; Farrand, W. H.⁷; Gupta, S.⁸; Schieber, J.⁹; Dietrich, W. E.¹⁰; Mangold, N.¹¹; Lewis, K. W.¹²; Sletten, R. S.¹³

1. University of Chicago
2. Los Alamos National Laboratory
3. University of Calgary
4. Planetary Science Institute
5. University of New Brunswick
6. California Institute of Technology
7. Space Science Institute
8. Imperial College London
9. Indiana University
10. University of California, Berkeley
11. University of Nantes
12. Johns Hopkins University
13. University of Washington

Abstract

Early Mars was habitable, at least intermittently, but major questions remain about how much water flowed and for how long. The paleoclimate evolution of Mars is captured by the stratigraphic record in Gale crater (Milliken et al. 2010). Climbing through mostly aeolian deposits reflecting arid conditions within Gale crater, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover encountered wave-rippled lake sediments of the basin-spanning Amapari Marker Band (AMB) that have very high metal enrichments (Fe, Mn, Zn). What caused the association between relatively wet primary depositional environment, and metal enrichment? Tentative, but reasonable extrapolation of rover metal data across the AMB suggests an excess Fe mass of 0.2 Gt. Transporting this Fe likely required ∼10,000 km³ of water flow, much more than the volume of the lake, across >10³ yr. Deposition of the Fe could be due to a redox or pH front within or just beneath the lake. One possible basin-scale synthesis involves a climate excursion consisting of initial cooling then subsequent warming: initial cooling permits wind scour in Gale basin and ice build-up on Gale's rim, while subsequent melting fills the lake and mobilizes Fe. Alternatively, the data can be explained by water-table fluctuations. In either case, the metal enrichment likely contributed to the hardness of these rocks, aiding wave-ripple preservation.

Copyright and License

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Acknowledgement

We thank the entire MSL team. Particular thanks to M. Loche, B. Hallet, and A. Vasavada for comments. We acknowledge Daniel Zhou, who made Fig. 3. Funding: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Participating Scientist Program grant 80NSSC22K0731 to Kite.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:

Edwin S. Kite reports financial support was provided by NASA. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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