Eighteen previously unknown martian basins have been detected on Viking photographs. The smallest basins have diameters 50 to 100 km less than the smallest known basins on Mercury or the moon. On the latter two planets and the earth, basin morphology varies with increasing diameter: central peak (CP) basins have both central peaks and fragmentary peak rings; peak ring (PR) basins have only conc...

Crater retention ages of the 20 largest impact basins previously recognized on Mars suggest most formed in a relatively short time, perhaps in less than 200 million years. New crustal thickness data suggests there are several additional very large basins, some lying outside the areas affected by those already known. Crater retention ages for these newly identified basins are not significantly o...

he global ocean is the last physical frontier on Earth. Covering 70 percent of the planetary surface, it is the largest, most complex biome we know. The ocean is a huge, mobile reservoir of heat and chemical mass. As such, it is the " engine " that drives weather-climate systems across the ocean basins and the continents, directly affecting food production , drought, and flooding on land. Water...

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. [1] The morphologic transition from complex impact craters, to peak-ring basins, and to multi-ring basins has been ...

A suite of 42 morphometric parameters for each of 26 272 drainage basins larger than 100 km2 from the Hydrosheds Shuttle Radar Topography digital elevation model shows the global distribution of Strahler order for streams and drainage basins. At the scale of 15 arc s spacing (232 to 464 m) the largest basins are order 9. Many common parameters depend both on the size of the basin, and the scale...

This article lists a number of geological data on the conditions of formation of some major gold deposits in the conglomerates of the Earth's crust. We analyze the metallogenic, tectonic, stratigraphic and other factors controlling the formation of gold-bearing conglomerates in certain fields, such as the Witwatersrand (S. Africa) and Darwaz (Tajikistan). The following tectonic factors play the...

Impact basins provide windows into the crustal structure and stratigraphy of planetary bodies; however, interpreting the stratigraphic origin of basin materials requires an understanding of the processes controlling basin formation and morphology. Peak-ring basins (exhibiting a rim crest and single interior ring of peaks) provide important insight into the basin-formation process, as they are t...

[1] We compare morphologies of drainage basins on Mars and Earth in order to confine the formation process ofMartian valley networks. Basins on both planets are computationally extracted from digital topography. Integral-geometry methods are used to represent each basin by a circularity function that encapsulates its internal structure. The shape of such a function is an indicator of the style ...

In systems that exhibit multistability, namely those that have more than one coexisting attractor, the basins of attraction evolve in specific ways with the creation of each new attractor. These multiple attractors can be created via different mechanisms. When an attractor is formed via a saddle-node bifurcation, the size of its basin increases as a power-law in the bifurcation parameter. In sy...