Mars's Lost Atmosphere and Valles Marineris

Stretching more than 4,000 kilometers along the Martian equator east of the Tharsis bulge and reaching up to 7 kilometers deep, Valles Marineris is the largest canyon system known in the solar system. Standard geology treats it as the multi-stage product of the growth and loading of the Tharsis volcanic province, involving crustal extension, subsidence, and possibly strike-slip motion, later widened by erosion. [1] [17] Electric Universe-style bloggers reject that reading: one argues that the canyon’s zigzag margins mark a prolonged electrical discharge between Mars and another planet [21], another that its figure-eight symmetry marks a capacitor-like discharge from the interior of Mars [22].

How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, which arrived at Mars in September 2014, transformed atmospheric-loss science from theoretical inference into measured bookkeeping. MAVEN’s first definitive finding, announced in 2015, was that the present-day solar wind strips roughly 100 grams of Martian atmosphere per second, a rate that, sustained over billions of years, becomes one of the principal ledgers in the planet’s climate history. The escaping material leaves through three distinct regions: almost 75% of the escaping ions come from the magnetotail in the solar wind’s wake, nearly 25% from a polar plume, and a minor contribution from an extended gas cloud surrounding the planet. The erosion increases significantly during solar storms, and when a series of solar storms hit Mars in March 2015, MAVEN found that the loss was accelerated. [2] [3]

Diagram of the MAVEN spacecraft with its science instruments labelled. Photo: NASA / Wikimedia Commons. Source

This stripping operates unimpeded because Mars lacks a global dipolar magnetic field today. Mars Global Surveyor established an upper limit of less than 2 × 10²¹ Gauss·cm³ for any planetary-scale field while documenting intense, spatially organized crustal remanent magnetization — lineations, the longest extending over 2,000 km, with field strengths exceeding 200 nT at spacecraft altitude, an order of magnitude stronger than Earth’s crustal field. The dichotomy implies a once-active internal dynamo that subsequently ceased, leaving behind a fossilized record. Paleomagnetic analyses of the ALH 84001 Martian meteorite have used the quantum diamond microscope to image igneous Fe-sulfides in chromite-sulfide assemblages, and infer that subpopulations may have been magnetized as recently as 3.9 to 3.8 Ga — evidence of a long-lived, potentially reversing dynamo [38]. When the dynamo died, Mars’s atmosphere was left directly exposed to solar-wind scavenging, a vulnerability it has never recovered from. [4] [5] [6]

Map of Mars’s crustal magnetic field measured by Mars Global Surveyor, with Tharsis, Valles Marineris and the major basins labelled. Photo: NASA / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The isotope record turns this exposure into a cumulative timestamp. Curiosity’s SAM instrument measured the deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) ratio in water released from Hesperian-era clays in Gale crater, about 3 billion years old, at 3.0 times the ratio in standard mean ocean water: half the value of the present Martian atmosphere, but substantially higher than expected for very early Mars, which indicates an extended history of hydrogen escape and desiccation of the planet [41]. A separate isotope clock — the ³⁸Ar/³⁶Ar ratio in the upper atmosphere — indicates that approximately 66% of all atmospheric ³⁶Ar ever introduced to Mars has escaped to space, an integrated record of cumulative loss independent of any single mechanism. [7]

The evidence supports cumulative stripping rather than a single stripping event. In 2025, a nine-year MAVEN analysis led by PI Shannon Curry produced the first direct observational confirmation of atmospheric sputtering on Mars, detecting sputtered argon atoms being knocked out of the upper atmosphere by solar-wind ions — more than four times higher than pre-MAVEN model predictions, and consistent with sputtering’s role as a sustained, storm-enhanced loss channel that may have dominated early-Mars escape when the young Sun’s electric field was stronger. Several mechanisms operate in parallel, among them solar-wind pickup of ions and sputtering. Jakosky’s own review of the water record concludes that the present state of models and of the data constraining them “preclude determining a unique history for water”, while still holding that “significant amounts of water have been lost to space and to other sinks” [39]. [8] [9] [10]

But the integrated numbers expose an unresolved tension. Mars Express ion-loss measurements integrated over ~4 Gyr yield only ~9 mbar of lost surface pressure from solar-wind-driven escape, less than 1% of the ~1 bar thought necessary to sustain ancient lakes and rivers, leaving mainstream science to debate whether the gap is closed by additional mechanisms (sputtering, impacts, photochemistry) or by unrecognized processes. [11] Taken together, the D/H record, the ³⁸Ar/³⁶Ar signal of ~66% loss and a present-day loss of ~100 g/s that increases significantly during storms suggest that loss to space was likely a major process in changing the Martian climate [2], although the Mars Express data imply that solar-wind ion escape alone removed only ~9 mbar [11], and the closure of the ancient-atmosphere budget remains an open quantitative question.

Valles Marineris as a Tectonic Canyon

Valles Marineris stretches more than 4,000 km along the Martian equator, reaches 200 km wide, and plunges to depths of 7 km — the largest canyon in the Solar System. Mainstream planetary geology treats this scar not as a single event but as a rift system: it is thought to be closely tied to the formation of the Tharsis bulge, which grew from the Noachian to the Late Hesperian period, and it was later enlarged by erosion and the collapse of its walls. The regional setting is an ancient tectonic landscape, not a recent catastrophe. [12] [1]

Viking orbiter mosaic of Mars centred on Valles Marineris. Photo: NASA / USGS / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Colour view from Mars Express of Coprates Chasma, part of the Valles Marineris system, with the pit chains of Coprates Catena beside it. Photo: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Inside the troughs sits a separate, still-unresolved problem: the Interior Layered Deposits, or ILDs, kilometer-thick mound-and-mesa accumulations of light-toned, stratified material that occupy the canyon floors. Competing mainstream hypotheses for their origin include subice volcanic constructs (tuyas), evaporite-cemented eolian dust linked to Meridiani-type sulfate deposition, ash washed down from the chasma walls, lacustrine sedimentation in isolated ancestral basins, and cold acidic dust-rich glaciers. The question is not academic: the ILDs are the stratigraphic record of whatever environment existed in the canyon during and after its opening. [13] [14] [15] [16]

Two HiRISE views of layered deposits in Melas Chasma, one of the central troughs of Valles Marineris. Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (HiRISE), modified by Jim Secosky / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The structural picture has also grown more complicated. Yin (2012) argued that southern Valles Marineris is a left-lateral transtensional strike-slip system with 150–160 km of cumulative displacement, drawing an explicit structural analogy to Earth’s Dead Sea Transform — a kinematic mode that does not fit the pure extensional-rift model. Dohm et al. (2009) documented a magmatic influence on Melas Chasma, including a >50 km caldera-like feature, a central topographic rise consistent with uplift, HiRISE-identified volcanic landforms, and CRISM sulfate outcrops interpreted as hydrothermal — evidence that the canyon’s evolution was not purely mechanical. Some local trough-bounding faults may still be active, as they cut recent surface deposits and landslides. This possible recent activity also argues against reading the canyon as a one-time, single-mechanism feature. [17] [18] [19] [36]

The fringe framing in the source set is qualitatively different. One fringe source in the corpus, an expanding-Earth presentation, rejects subduction as ‘a totally unsupportable and scientifically unsound idea’ while accepting that the sea floor is spreading at the rifts, illustrating a broader catastrophist tendency to dismiss parts of the geological framework that underlies mainstream interpretation of both Earth and Mars landscapes. [20] Such sources offer none of the structural modeling, budget calculations, or kinematic analysis that mainstream Mars geology applies to test and refine hypotheses. Mainstream Mars geology, by contrast, continues to refine a multi-mechanism, multi-billion-year history. The open question is not whether Valles Marineris is a single catastrophic scar — its multi-stage structural history and its layered deposits argue against that — but how the Tharsis-driven extension, the proposed strike-slip component, the magmatic overprint, and later erosional and depositional modification weigh against one another in the canyon’s integrated history.

The Electric Universe Discharge Hypothesis

The Electric Universe (EU) framework was developed by Wallace Thornhill, who studied physics and electronics at the University of Melbourne, and David Talbott, and is promoted by the community of The Thunderbolts Project. The framework holds that electric currents flowing along plasma filaments shape and power galaxies and stars, and that craters on the planets come from electrical arcs, like lightning bolts, that sear their surfaces. Thornhill traces his interest to Immanuel Velikovsky’s catastrophist book Worlds in Collision (1950). [25] Valles Marineris is a favourite case for EU-style writers. One blog argues that the canyon is the scar of a prolonged electrical discharge between Mars and another planet rather than a rift, pointing to its zigzag edges, its width in the middle, the absence of a taper, and a round pattern at one end [21]. Another asserts a dipolar symmetry between Tharsis and Olympus Mons on one side and the Hellas and Argyre basins on the other, which it says no theory based on tectonic forces, volcanism, erosion, or impact explains, and reads the canyon as the scar of a capacitor-like discharge from the interior of Mars [22].

The empirical scaffolding for this claim comes from small-scale laboratory work. EU advocates cite the Steinbacher–Yelverton “Crooked Smile” experiment — a dielectric layer over a grounded plate with a pin-matrix electrode suspended above, in which sand charged by drifting through an electric field produced a sand-free interference pattern claimed to match the canyon’s shape. [22] This tabletop setup produces nothing resembling a 4,000-kilometer canyon, and the source describes no quantitative scaling of it to planetary dimensions. The EU offers no mathematical formalism linking the experiment to Valles Marineris — Thornhill’s own statement “Mathematics is not physics” is on record — and even a follower of the movement says its proponents “need to work the maths out and get their papers peer-tested”. [25] The “Crooked Smile” remains a tabletop analog in search of a planetary scale it cannot justify.

The actual electrical environment of Mars, as now measured, is something the EU did not predict and cannot accommodate. NASA’s Perseverance rover recorded 55 triboelectric discharge events with its SuperCam microphone over two Martian years, usually associated with dust devils and dust storm convective fronts, and the discharges reached the near-surface breakdown threshold of the Martian atmosphere, predicted to be on the order of several tens of kV per metre [40]. Sixteen of these events coincided with dust devils passing directly over the rover, and thirty-five with convective fronts of regional dust storms. The discharges are comparable in physical strength to the static shock of walking across a carpet and touching a doorknob. Critically, the EU claims Valles Marineris and other surface features are the result of planetary-scale “cosmic thunderbolts,” while the measured Martian discharges are tied to local turbulent dust lofting rather than to global dust abundance or season — and they carry implications for atmospheric chemistry (perchlorate formation, possible rapid destruction of methane), not for canyon excavation. The detection itself is real; the EU’s interpretation of it as evidence for past planetary-scale discharge is not. [23]

Mosaic of the Valles Marineris canyon system, with the fractured terrain of Noctis Labyrinthus at its western (left) end. Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech / USGS / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The mainstream geological interpretation of Valles Marineris treats it as a tectonic feature, not a discharge scar. The canyon is over 4,000 km long, 200 km wide, and up to 7 km deep. [1] An alternative mainstream interpretation (An Yin, 2012) proposes 150–160 km of left-lateral strike-slip displacement in the Ius–Melas–Coprates fault zone, geometrically comparable to Earth’s Dead Sea transform. [18] Elsewhere on Mars, a global survey led by the University of Texas at Austin (Goudge et al., Nature 2021) identified 262 breached crater lakes whose outlet canyons account for ~24% of Mars’s total river-valley volume despite representing only 3% of total valley length, with a median breach-valley depth of 170.5 m — catastrophic fluvial processes, not electrical discharge, doing the erosional work. [24]

The EU framework has not been formulated in testable, quantitative terms. Its proponents call Einstein’s two relativities “laughable fiction”, and the framework has no unified mathematical laws underpinning it; astronomer Phil Plait counters: “We know stars generate energy through nuclear fusion, not plasma discharge; we know craters are formed from asteroid and comet impacts, not huge electric arcs”. The framework draws on Velikovsky’s 1950 Worlds in Collision, which proposed that Venus was ejected from Jupiter around 1500 BCE and caused catastrophes on Earth, including a brief halt of Earth’s spin — an idea astrophysicists pointed out violated theories about orbits and gravity. On the specific matter of Valles Marineris, the EU supplies no quantitative analysis of the canyon’s fault geometry, no calculation of the energy budget required to excavate the documented volume of rock, and no reconciliation of the discharge claim with the canyon’s long modification by erosion and landslides. The hypothesis remains a laboratory analogy in search of a planetary scale it cannot justify, while mainstream mapping of the canyon itself continues, fault by fault, in quantitative terms the EU framework cannot match. [25] [26]

The Long History of Mars Catastrophism

The legend of the Martian canals, born from Giovanni Schiaparelli’s canali of 1877 and their mistranslation as “canals”, survived into the Space Age, then collapsed. The Mariner 4 flyby in 1965 returned images of impact craters and a generally barren landscape and debunked for good the idea that any canal features existed. Modern historians of science widely agree that the canals were a perceptual and linguistic artifact, arising from telescope limitations combined with optical illusions. [42] Velikovsky advanced a catastrophist framework in which Mars was ejected from a more distant orbit into one closer to Earth, with a near-collision occurring in 687 BCE causing catastrophic earthquakes, lava flows, tsunamis, and atmospheric disturbances on Earth, while also abruptly shifting Earth’s spin axis and changing the year from 360 to 365¼ days. Velikovsky maintained that electromagnetic effects, not gravity, dominated celestial mechanics at close range. The framework is rejected by mainstream science as a canonical example of pseudoscience and catastrophism. [27] [28]

Viking 1 photographed a mesa in the Cydonia region on 25 July 1976 that had the appearance of a human face, which Viking scientists dismissed at the time as a trick of light and shadow. Some commentators, most notably Richard C. Hoagland, came to see the Face on Mars as evidence of a long-lost Martian civilization. Mainstream resolution came in stages. Mars Global Surveyor’s camera showed it to be a normal geologic feature [29]. Later imaging by Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express, at much higher resolution than Viking’s, showed a natural hill whose face-like appearance depends on the viewing angle and angle of illumination — an optical illusion of the kind seen in terrestrial landforms such as the Old Man of the Mountain. [43]

The Cydonia “Face” in a low-resolution Viking orbiter image, shown with transmission noise (left) and after median filtering (right). Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona User:Anton (rp) 2005 / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The contemporary fringe wave goes by the name “Electric Universe,” and its proponents explicitly trace the conceptual roots back to Velikovsky’s catastrophism. The Thunderbolts Project, associated with this movement, advances a model in which planetary scarring and ancient mythology are attributed to plasma discharge events rather than conventional geology. The pattern across these waves is consistent. A striking surface feature orients to a human pattern-recognition bias — engineered canals, an artificial face — and is then resolved by better observation. The recurring failure lies in human cognition, not in the imaging. [25] [22] [29]

Connecting the Dots

The opening of Valles Marineris and the onset of major atmospheric loss at Mars both belong to early Martian history. ESA’s chronology places the creation of the Valles Marineris rift system in the Noachian, 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago, together with the growth of the Tharsis bulge. [34] The canyon’s formation is attributed to crustal stresses from the growth and loading of the Tharsis volcanic province, then widened by erosion and landslides. [1] Mars possesses strong crustal remanent magnetization but no present-day global dipolar magnetic field, indicating an ancient internal dynamo that ceased early in geologic time. This absence of a global field leaves the atmosphere directly exposed to solar wind stripping. MAVEN measured the present-day solar-wind-driven atmospheric loss rate at approximately 100 grams per second, with almost 75% of escaping ions leaving through the magnetotail. Canyon formation and the end of the dynamo thus both fall in early Martian history, the period after which the atmosphere lay open to sustained stripping to space. [30] [2]

The mundane reading of the Martian electrical data is itself remarkable in scale. NASA’s Perseverance rover directly confirmed electrical discharges — sparks and mini-shockwaves — occurring within Martian dust devils and dust-storm fronts for the first time, recorded by the SuperCam microphone. The discharges are physically weak, comparable to the static shock of touching a doorknob after walking across a carpet, owing to Mars’s thin CO2 atmosphere and low breakdown threshold. [23] Critically, 54 of 55 detected events occurred during the top 30% of strongest winds in the analyzed recordings — a tight correlation with localized turbulent dust lofting rather than with global dust storm seasons. [40] The mechanism is triboelectric charging, the same effect that produces static on Earth. Mainstream geology itself accepts genuinely catastrophic mechanisms on Mars where the evidence requires them, such as the rapid floods from breached crater lakes described above. [24]

Where the catastrophist claims depart from the evidence is in their handling of observation versus mechanism. Velikovsky’s framework posited that Mars was ejected into a closer orbit with a near-collision in 687 BCE producing catastrophic earthquakes, lava flows, and electromagnetic interactions on Earth. That work is classified by the mainstream scientific community as a canonical example of pseudoscience and catastrophism. [31] The modern Electric Universe variant and Velikovskian catastrophism share a rhetorical move: inverting the relationship between observation and evidence, treating a single qualitative feature — zigzag edges, figure-eight symmetry, antipodal geometry — as diagnostic of a cosmic-scale mechanism rather than as a pattern that requires quantitative, predictive, and falsifiable analysis. [21] [22] The historical trajectory makes the pattern explicit. Schiaparelli’s 19th-century canali were mistranslated as “canals” and read as waterways or engineering works. [42] The “Face on Mars” in Cydonia was imaged by Viking 1 in 1976, but higher-resolution imaging showed it to be a natural hill whose face-like appearance is an optical illusion, like the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire. [43] The same pattern-recognition heuristic that read engineered canals into the canali is now producing claims about discharge scars and figure-eight dipolar geometry on the canyon walls.

What both frameworks share is narrower than either side typically admits. Quantitative MAVEN measurements of atmospheric loss and the Electric Universe discharge hypothesis are not actually in simple disagreement — the EU claim concerns Valles Marineris morphology, while the MAVEN solar-wind-stripping observations concern loss rate, not canyon origin. Mainstream science holds that Mars once had a thicker atmosphere and attributes its loss to shutdown of the internal magnetic dynamo followed by solar-wind stripping over geologic time, an endogenic/solar process rather than a discrete cosmic collision. Both sides describe a transformed Mars — and the evidence places that transformation deep in geologic time, driven by internal geology and the Sun, not by recent planetary encounters. [32]

The Other Side

Velikovsky’s catastrophist framework offers no quantitative account of how much atmospheric gas Mars is thought to have lost. MAVEN’s decade-long dataset has produced specific numbers instead: ion-escape rates and cumulative loss integrated through time, with first direct observations of sputtering reported in 2025 [8] [9], while isotope ratios record the integrated loss [7]. The conventional position treats solar-wind stripping — modulated by loss of the global magnetic field — as the primary driver of atmospheric escape. The cumulative ion-escape tally integrated over billions of years falls short of the bar-count Mars is thought to have lost, a quantitative ledger mainstream models close through impact erosion, carbonate sequestration in the crust, photochemical escape, and oxidation of surface minerals rather than invoking a planetary-scale electrical scenario that has never been formulated quantitatively at Mars scale. [32]

Valles Marineris is read by mainstream geologists through testable, geographically constrained mechanisms rather than planetary discharge, and there are many competing hypotheses for how it formed. [33] At least three tectonic models are in active competition — Yin’s left-lateral strike-slip interpretation, Andrews-Hanna’s subsidence model tied to the uplift of Tharsis, and Dohm and colleagues’ magmatic-influence hypothesis. [17] [36] The Interior Layered Deposits remain contested between lacustrine, volcanic, eolian, glacial, and groundwater-upwelling origins. [13] [15] [16] EU advocates frequently cite this internal fragmentation as evidence the mainstream lacks a complete answer; the situation differs categorically from the EU alternative in that the competing hypotheses can in principle be falsified, and the literature routinely publishes results that rule specific candidates in or out — a process the discharge scenario has never been subjected to.

What We Actually Know

Valles Marineris is documented at more than 4,000 km along the Martian equator, stretching east of the Tharsis volcanic province from Noctis Labyrinthus to Chryse Planitia, with depths up to 7 km. [1] Mainstream geology attributes this to a multi-stage tectonic history driven by the growth and loading of the Tharsis bulge, with ESA placing the creation of the rift system in the Noachian. [34] Yin (2012) proposes a left-lateral strike-slip component, with 150–160 km offsets in the Ius–Melas–Coprates fault zone and more than 100 km of total slip along a continuous >2,000 km, <50 km-wide zone; this is contested by subsidence models, and some trough-bounding faults may still be active. [17] The Electric Universe counter-claim, that the canyon is a scar of prolonged high-energy planetary electrical discharge between Mars and another body, with zigzag edge patterns cited as alleged discharge signatures, offers no quantitative kinematic testing, no lithological or mineralogical predictions, and no mechanism that explains the proposed left-lateral strike-slip organization. [21]

The atmospheric-loss side of the picture is well-documented through converging independent channels. An ancient internal dynamo that produced a global dipolar field ceased operation early in Mars’s history — paleomagnetic analyses of ALH 84001 suggest it may still have been active around 3.9 to 3.8 Ga [38] — leaving the crustal remanent magnetization that Mars Global Surveyor mapped at strengths exceeding terrestrial crustal values by more than an order of magnitude, with east–west linear crustal features, the longest extending over 2,000 km. [35] [5] Once the global field collapsed, solar-wind stripping became an important escape pathway — directly measured in situ by MAVEN at a present-day baseline of approximately 100 g/s (~3.15 × 10⁶ kg/yr), increasing significantly during solar storms. [2] The D/H isotopic record indicates that the loss was cumulative: the water in ~3-billion-year-old clays has a D/H of 3.0 times standard mean ocean water, half the present atmospheric value, which indicates an extended history of hydrogen escape. [41] Mineralogical and geomorphic evidence places Early Mars under a denser atmosphere with surface liquid water, leaving today’s tenuous, unbreathable CO₂ atmosphere at a few thousandths of Earth’s surface pressure.

At the plausible-but-uncertain tier, the mainstream view of Valles Marineris is genuinely multi-causal: alongside Andrews-Hanna-style Tharsis-load subsidence, Dohm et al. document a magmatic-influence component including a >50 km caldera/vent on the Melas Chasma SW flank, central topographic rise, HiRISE volcanic landforms, CRISM sulfate-rich hydrothermal outcrops, and GRS K/Th signatures consistent with water–magma interaction, and the UCLA subsidence-model summary explicitly noting that pure-load subsidence does not easily account for both horizontal and vertical motion. Perseverance has recorded 55 distinct electrical discharge events with its SuperCam microphone, confirming that long-suspected atmospheric static discharges are real on Mars; they are physically weak, and a quantitative mismatch persists between these observations and any gigascale discharge scarring claimed by EU proponents. [36] [17] [23]

The speculative tier contains the genuinely unsubstantiated claims. The Electric Universe framework draws its lineage from Velikovsky’s 1950 catastrophism, whose specific astronomical assertions — Mars shifted into a closer orbit, near-collision with Earth in 687 BCE, planetary earthquakes and tsunamis — are treated as a canonical pseudoscience case and are rejected. [27] [28] The Steinbacher–Yelverton “Crooked Smile” is a tabletop laboratory analog [22], and extrapolating from such small-scale discharges to a 4,000 km canyon would require a scaling across many orders of magnitude that no cited source has quantified. The Young-Earth Creationist antipodal-catastrophe interpretation, pairing Hellas impact basin antipodally with Tharsis volcanoes and Alba Patera as evidence of a focused shock-wave catastrophe globally comparable to the Genesis Flood, lacks any published quantitative seismic-coupling calculation showing a Hellas-class impact can focus enough energy to drive Tharsis-scale volcanism, and the structural sequence (Tharsis load producing VM faulting) actually argues against the antipodal-cause framing. [37]

The earlier Mars-history catastrophist traditions have been directly disposed of by observation. The 19th/early-20th-century “Martian canals” read into Schiaparelli’s canali were a perceptual and linguistic artifact, ruled out for good when Mariner 4 (1965) returned images showing a cratered, barren landscape with no canal features. [42] The “Face on Mars” in Cydonia, imaged by Viking 1 in 1976, was shown by Mars Global Surveyor to be a normal geologic feature [29], and later Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express imagery confirmed a natural hill whose face-like appearance depends on lighting and viewing angle, comparable to Earth’s Old Man of the Mountain. [43] What the investigation could not resolve is whether the weak but recurring Martian electrostatic discharges documented by Perseverance scale to anything geologically significant beyond the surface-chemistry domain: the recorded discharges are physically weak and tied to the strongest winds, with 54 of 55 events in the top 30% of wind speeds [40], and that unresolved energy-scale reconciliation is the open question the research surfaced.

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