Hi there! Did you know that there could be avalanches on the Moon? Why not? You have slopes, you have boulders, so you can have avalanches! Not snow avalanches of course. This is the topic of Granular avalanches on the Moon: Mass-wasting conditions, processes and features, by B.P. Kokelaar, R.S. Bahia, K.H. Joy, S. Viroulet and J.M.N.T. Gray, which has recently been accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

The Moon vs. the Earth

On the Moon we have

• No atmosphere: The wind cannot trigger an avalanche. Moreover, the erosion is much slower than on Earth, since it is only due to micrometeorites bombardment. The erosion tends to flatten the terrains. When you have no erosion, an steep terrain may remain steep for ages/
• No liquid water: This means no snow! This is why you have no snow avalanche. Another consequence of this absence of fluid is that no rain can trigger an avalanche, and the regolith involved is necessarily dry. Wet sand does not behave like dry sand.
• Less gravity: The gravity on the Moon is about one sixth of the gravity of the Earth, and as you can imagine, gravity assists the avalanches. It appears that a smaller gravity results in slower avalanches, but the final result remains pretty the same, i.e. you cannot infer the gravity from the final result of an avalanche.

The irregularity of the Moon’s topography is mainly due to the numerous impact craters. The steep edges of the craters are where avalanches happen.

Causes of the avalanches

For an avalanche to happen, you need a favorable terrain, and a triggering event.

A favorable terrain is first a slope. If you are flat enough, then the boulders would not be inclined to roll. The required limit inclination is called the dynamic angle of repose. On Earth, the dry sand has a dynamic angle of repose of 34°, while the wet sand remains stable up to 45°. This illustrates pretty well the influence of the water.

Triggering an avalanche requires to shake the terrain enough. A way is an impact occurring far enough to not alter the slope, but close enough to shake the terrain. Another way is a seismic phenomenon, due to geophysical activity of the Moon.

Datasets

The authors focused their efforts on the Kepler crater, before investigating 6 other ones. The impact craters have to be preserved enough, in particular from micrometeorite impacts. These craters are:

Crater	Diameter	Slope
Kepler	31 km	~32°
Gambart B	11 km	~30°
Bessel	16 km	31.5°
Censorinus	3.8 km	32°
Riccioli CA	14.2 km	34°
Virtanen F	11.8 km	32°
Tralles A	18 km	32°

The first 4 of these craters are situated in maria, while the last three are in highlands. These means that we have different types of regolith.

We need high-precision data to determine the shape of the avalanches. The space mission Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) furnishes such data. In particular the authors used:

• Images from the LROC, for LRO Camera. This instrument is equipped of 3 cameras, two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs), with a resolution between 0.42 and 1.3 meter per pixel, and a WAC, for Wide Angle Camera, with a resolution of 100 m /pixel, but with a much wider field. The NAC data permitted to characterize the type of flow, while the WAC data gave their extent.
• Digital Elevation Models (DEM), obtained from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA), mentioned here, and from the Terrain Camera of the Japanese mission SELENE / Kaguya. Knowing the variations of the topography permitted to estimate the slopes of the craters and the volume of flowing material.

Three flow types

And from the images, the authors determined 3 types of flows:

• Multiple Channel and Lobe (MCL): these are accumulations of multiple small-volume flows. These flows are the most common in the study, and can be found on Earth too,
• Single-Surge Polylobate (SSP): the flows have the structure of fingers,
• Multiple Ribbon (MR): these are very elongated flows with respect to their widths, i.e. they are typically kilometer-long and meter-wide. These flows have been predicted by lab experiments, but this is their first observation on a planetary body. In particular, they are not present on the Earth. Lab experiments suggest that they are extremely sensitive to slope changes.

The word flow evokes a fluid phenomenon. Of course, there is no fluid at the surface of the Moon, but granular regolith may have a kind of fluid behavior. A true fluid would have a dynamic angle of repose of 0°. Regolith has a higher angle of repose because of friction, that prevents it from flowing. But it of course depends on the nature of the regolith. In particular, fine-grained material tends to reduce friction, and consequently increases the mobility of the material. This results in extended flows.

But this extension has some limitation. On Earth, we observe flows on adverse slopes, which are thought to be facilitated by the presence of liquid water. This statement is enforced by the fact that no such flow has been observed on the Moon.

The accuracy of data we dispose on the Moon has permitted the first observations of granular flows in dry and atmosphereless conditions. Such results could probably be extrapolated to other similar bodies (Mercury? Ceres? Pluto?).

Laboratory experiments

The multiple ribbon have been predicted by lab experiments. It is fascinating to realize that we can reproduce lunar condition in a room, and with accelerated timescales. This is made possible by the normalization of physical quantities.
If we write down the equations ruling the granular flows, we have a set of 3 partial derivative equations, involving the avalanche thickness, and the concentration and velocity of the particles. Mathematical manipulations on these equations permit to emphasize quantities, which have no physical dimension. For instance, the height of a mountain divided by the radius of the planet, or the time you need to read this article divided by the time I need to write it… In acting on all the quantities involved in such adimensional numbers, we can reduce an impact crater of the Moon evolving during millions of years, to a room evolving during a few days…
In this problem, a critical number is the Froude number, which depends on the gravity, the avalanche thickness, the velocity, and the slope.

The study and the authors

• The study, which is freely available for everyone since the authors paid for Open Access. Many thanks to them!
• The study is also presented by the authors on this blog,
• The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera,
• The SELENE / Kaguya mission,
• The web page of (Brian) Peter Kokelaar,
• The one of Katherine Joy,
• The web page of Sylvain Viroulet,
• and the one of Nico Gray.

That’s it for today! Please do not forget to comment. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook.