Connections: Alluvial Flows
It turns out that NASA has been photographing the planet Mars from the Mars Global Surveyor for a long time. According to Wikipedia, the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) discovered:
an ancient, eroded, and exhumed sedimentary distributary fan located in a crater at 24.3°S, 33.5°W. A distributary fan is a generic term used by geologists to describe a family of deposits that includes river deltas and alluvial fans. Sometime in the distant past, when it was still possible for liquid water to flow across the martian surface, sediments transported through valleys by water formed a fan-shaped deposit in a 64-kilometer (40 miles) -diameter crater northeast of Holden Crater.
According to this Wikipedia article, this is a photograph of a "distributary fan-delta"!
Can you believe this? There used to be water on Mars!
It looks a lot like the photograph of a river delta here on earth that I have; I just can't figure out how to add it to this post. I'll try again later. OK. Here it is:
Believe it or not, this is another NASA photograph. It is probably a satellite photo and it is of the Okavango River delta in Botswana, Africa.
My mind is officially blown.
