Data and Code for "Thermophysical Properties of Fluvial Ridges on Earth and Applications to Mars"

Mars’s ancient sedimentary basins archive evidence of past water, but their stratigraphy is difficult to interpret without tectonism to create recognizable vertical exposures. Fluvial ridges on Mars are sinuous erosional landforms that may provide insight into these buried basins, but their origin remains debated. Channel-belt exhumation is a formation mechanism for these ridges, and it suggests that ridges form through differential erosion of cemented, basin-filling fluvial deposits. Alternatively, landscape inversion by clast armoring produces ridges when coarse grains protect former channel surfaces from wind erosion, recording a snapshot of the landscape. These two mechanisms lead to very different interpretations, as they represent opposite ends of a river system. Thermal infrared data from Mars shows that many martian fluvial ridges have higher thermal inertia than surrounding plains, where thermal inertia is a thermophysical property describing a material’s resistance to temperature change. This observation has been hypothesized to indicate that cementation is driving ridge formation rather than surface armoring. However, this hypothesis cannot be directly tested with available data on Mars. Here, we tested this hypothesis at the Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah, which has sandstone and conglomerate-capped ridges formed through channel-belt exhumation. We measure temperature changes of ridge caps, armored flanks, and unarmored flanks using a combination of high spatial and temporal resolution thermal emission measurements from an overnight field survey in tandem with high spatial and temporal coverage remote sensing data. The ridge caps show consistently warmer nighttime temperatures than clast-armored and unarmored flanks, which supports the hypothesis that elevated thermal inertia in martian ridges reflects lithified rock.