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Slope Streak (Mars)

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms
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Definition

Narrow fan-shaped low-albedo feature extending downslope; seen on equatorial, high-albedo, dust-mantled slopes of Mars (Sullivan et al. 2001; Schorghofer et al. 2007).

Category

A type of mass wasting

Synonyms

Dust avalanche (interpretation); Dark slope streak; Talus streak

Description

Elongated streak-like features on slopes. Slope streaks have sharp edges and downward increasing width, and sometimes they show anastomosing pattern. Slope streaks closely follow the topography of the terrain. They sometimes go around obstacles, but there are cases where they extend through small obstacles (Aharonson et al. 2003). Slope streaks rarely have discernible downhill deposits (Sullivan et al. 2001).

They are mostly darker, but occasionally brighter than their surroundings. The apparent strong contrast on published images is due to the contrast stretch of the images of dusty regions for which the albedo variations are generally low. Albedo difference is typically 10 % for dark slope...

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References

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Correspondence to Norbert Schörghofer .

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Schörghofer, N. (2015). Slope Streak (Mars). In: Hargitai, H., Kereszturi, Á. (eds) Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3134-3_344

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