Earth and Planetary Sciences ETDs

Publication Date

Summer 7-29-2025

Abstract

Chaos terrain exists on several planetary bodies but most notably on Mars. With 30 different named terrains and hundreds of chaotic or ”chaos-like” terrains, they are one of the most prominent and visible features on the planet. Chaos terrains have many visible similarities to each other: they all are comprised of polygonal blocks separated by fractures or channels. These blocks vary from angular to rounded and from flat plateaus to small hills, and the fractures vary from flat floored to ”v” shaped. Often, a single chaos will contain all of these morphologies. Most of the 30 named chaoses on Mars exist within or adjacent to the Chyse Planitia outflow system, with many of them serving as potential sources of outflow. This suggests that these terrains were formed along with the channels, and most research has indeed suggested that this is the case. However, some terrains are unique enough to suggest they may have formed in a different manner than the outflow terrains, and there is still no consensus on how each outflow terrain formed. Some work has explored the morphology of chaos in a comparative manner to differentiate these terrains by formation mechanism; we continued in this approach within the mathematical framework of convex mosaics to analytically describe chaos’ fracture patterns. This work also explored automated approaches to mapping chaos with moderate success, though additional work is needed to fully automate some aspects of this methodology. We found that this approach is promising and that chaos fractures can be described with this framework. However, the fractures within different chaoses are not dissimilar enough to be statistically differentiated from each other. Additional geomorphological parameters will likely be needed to be extracted from each chaos terrain to be adequately clustered.

Degree Name

Earth and Planetary Sciences

Level of Degree

Masters

Department Name

Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

First Committee Member (Chair)

Louis Scuderi

Second Committee Member

Eric Lindsey

Third Committee Member

Marisa Repasch

Fourth Committee Member

Horton Newsom

Language

English

Keywords

mars, remote sensing, planetary science

Document Type

Thesis

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