DECIPHERING MARS' GLOBAL ATMOSPHERE THROUGH THE LENS OF BARCHAN DUNE MORPHOLOGY (Invited Presentation)

In the absence of widespread meteorological data, active landforms on Mars offer a lens through which environmental conditions can be observed and monitored. Specifically, barchan dunes serve as reliable indicators of dominant winds, sediment availability, and substrate properties. In this study, we leverage the abundance of barchan dunes on Mars to investigate atmospheric and surface processes on a global scale: using a convolutional neural network, we outline over a million barchan dunes on the martian surface, and analyze trends in slipface orientation, dimensions, horn asymmetry, and horn elongation.

Our study opens several new avenues for understanding Mars' atmosphere and the physical laws that govern aeolian sand transport; the correlation between the sizes of incipient dunes and atmospheric density sheds light on the hydrodynamic principles controlling the formation of large martian ripples. The orientations of barchan slipfaces, which predominantly align with the primary wind direction, provides a detailed picture of wind circulation across the Martian surface. The changing dynamics of dune slipfaces in volatile-rich environments reveal how aeolian sand transport responds to the presence of surface and ground ice. These findings underscore the importance of global geomorphological investigations, especially those aided by machine learning techniques, in advancing our understanding of planetary climates and physics-based theory in extraterrestrial environments.