Water, water, everywhere…?

Planetary Geomorphology Image of the Month, September 1, 2016: Susan J. Conway (CNRS and LPG Nantes, France). The similarity of water-formed landforms on Earth is often used as a key argument for the involvement of liquid water in shaping the surfaces of other planets. The major drawback of the argument is “equifinality” whereby very similar looking landforms can be produced by entirely different processes. A good illustration is leveed channels with lobate deposits (Image 1). Such landforms can be built on Earth by wet debris flow, lava flow, pyroclastic flows and they are also found on Mars (de Haas et al., 2015; Johnsson et al., 2014) where the formation process is debated. [More at link]