Img: Gabilan Mesa, California, showing evenly spaced ridges and valleys. Credit: Courtesy / Ionut Iordache (UC Berkeley) / Taylor Perron (MIT)
Researchers in the United States have explained why regular landforms such as ridges and valleys are so similar and contend their discovery could help the search for life on distant planets.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have uncovered the animal element in the rolling landscape and say it is this that controls the size of the ridge and valleys.
According to a MIT release: "Most landscapes are made up of ridges and valleys," says Taylor Perron, an assistant professor of geology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences."
"The most fundamental question we can ask is 'What controls their size?'" The basic mechanism that forms ridges and valleys, explains Perron, is a balance between two competing processes: gradual incision of valleys by flowing water, and the tendency of the land to slump into more rounded forms as soil slowly creeps downslope. The first tends to create sharp relief in the landscape, while the second process tends to smooth it out."
"The ridge-valley wavelength is one way that Earth's landscapes bear the imprint of life," he adds.
Perron says burrowing animals have an smoothing effect on the landscape.
"Biotic agents like burrowing rodents slowly stir the soil," Perron says. "On average, they displace it downslope. This smooths out sharp corners in the landscape."
Perron says his team's research may help may it easier for scientists to identify life on other planets saying the analysis provides "a way of measuring the influence of life here on Earth."
The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and NASA.
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