Interactive comment on “Glacier-like forms on Mars” by B. Hubbard et al.

• Main Author: Haeberli, Wilfried
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus 2014
• Subjects: Ice; permafrost; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/96230; https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000096230

In their paper about “glacier-like forms on Mars”, Hubbard et al. (2014) describe land-forms which, in their opinion, are “strikingly similar in planform appearance to terrestrialvalley glaciers”. The well-organized surface structure of these flow features, however,has little in common with the mostly chaotic surface structure observed for debris-covered valley glaciers on Earth. Much more striking is the resemblance with land-forms created by cumulative creep deformation of ice-debris mixtures in terrestrial per-mafrost, often called rock glaciers (cf., for instance, Figure 2 in Haeberli, 2013, andArenson et al., 2007 or the remark by referee Kuhn). Concerning crevasses, Fig 6cin the paper by Hubbard et al. looks like features in creeping terrestrial permafrost described by Roer et al. (2008) or Buchli et al. (2014), and Figure 8c may representcommon features of volume loss and subsidence, due to thawing of subsurface ice interrestrial permafrost. ISSN:1994-0416 ISSN:1994-0424