QUOTE (dvandorn @ Mar 5 2009, 03:13 AM)
I bet you get liquid water in some locations (and possibly in minuscule quantities) when Mars' axial tilt goes into the 30-plus degree range -- which could be responsible for some of the gullies we see.
Yes, that's what this paper says; they interpret the gullies as forming by running liquid water as surface snowpack and ice melt.
A kindly soul sent me copies of this paper, AND four others on the topic of gullies. (I'd forgotten about Pelletier, Kolb, McEwen, Kirk (Geology, 2008) which I'd even
posted about here..! ) The others are the original Malin/Edgett (Science, 2006) paper describing new bright deposits and interpreting them as present-day water flows, and Head, Marchant, Krevlavsky (PNAS, 2008), "Formation of gullies on Mars: Link to recent climate history and insolation microenvironments implicate surface water flow origin". This lot will take me a week or two to digest properly, so I've only glanced through the paper that, er, this topic's actually about. (My thanks again to the donor, if you're reading this
)
Hopefully it's OK, copyright-wise, to quote a small extract of the paper for the purpose of review. This seems (on a fast skim) to be the crucial passage relating to the dating of the rayed crater:
(There's an older, outer crater, and a younger inner one which is interpreted as the source of the secondaries on the fan deposits.)
QUOTE
...morphological observations of the outer crater suggest that it predates deposition of latitude-dependent mantling deposits that would obscure fresh crater rays. [...]
Therefore, we interpret the inner crater as the source of the rays and secondary craters of interest, and younger than the most recent episode of latitude-dependent mantling deposition at this low latitude. Our morphological observations suggest that the
outer crater predates the end of an obliquity-controlled period of latitude-dependent mantle deposition, while the inner crater appears to post-date the most recent period of mantle deposition (Head et al, 2003). To test this proposition quantitatively we performed crater counts on smooth near-rim units of the inner crater. These units north and south of the inner crater both yield crater retention (CRE) ages of ~1.25 Ma (Fig. 3b) based upon isochrons of Hartmann (2005). The use of small craters for age dating is supported by the small crater production rates observed on Mars by Malin et al. (2006) which agree within a factor of three with the isochron system (Hartmann, 2007). Similarly, Hartmann and Quantin-Nataf (2008) showed that counts of small craters could be used effectively to date young rayed craters. Therefore, our crater counts on the smooth rim deposits yield a robust CRE age of formation for the inner crater of ~1.25 Ma and imply that this crater is among the youngest craters of its size on Mars.