A Global Perspective on Lunar Granular Flows

Dry granular flows are ubiquitous, yet poorly understood mass wasting features on the Moon. Above all, their global distribution, relation to physical environment, and drivers understood. Here, we build deploy a convolutional neural network map 28,101 flow between 60°N S by scanning through ∼150,000 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images. We observe that heterogeneously distributed over Moon, where all major hotspots located in craters almost nearside maria. further younger surfaces feature higher densities, while pre-Nectarian terranes can still host flows, remaining subject active erosion billions of years after formation. Our observations suggest impacts at various scales have been—and likely are—acting as main, global-scale, long- short-term driver occurrence, strongly influenced properties target rock material.