Abstract:
Martian outflow channels are extensive, long features on the planet's surface, running for thousands of kilometers and up to a kilometer deep. Scientific consensus attributes the formation of Martian outflow channels to catastrophic floods from overflowing lakes during Mars' early history. However, we present an alternative perspective, suggesting the possibility of past glacier ice streams on Mars, influenced by recent scientific studies indicating movements in Amazonian ice streams as potential carvers of Martian outflow channels. The paper proposes a hypothesis of a past cryosphere on Mars resulting in ice stream outflow channels. The study compares and analyzes Martian outflow channels and Himalayan glaciers using a novel remote sensing image processing workflow developed to support this proposed idea. The methodology involves topographic correction to normalize radiance measurements in uneven terrain, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract maximum variance information, and feature matching using Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) with Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) outlier removal to assign Feature Similarity Metric (FSM) scores for determining analogous sites. The paper highlights intriguing observations from Himalayan glaciers, which lend credence to the idea of an ice flow mechanism for the origin of Martian outflow channels.