Titan

Titan’s Fluvial and Lacustrine Landscapes

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
astro-ph.EP
February 5, 2025
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Titan’s Fluvial and Lacustrine Landscapes
Distribution of fluvial and lacustrine features on Titan. Most of Titan’s valley networks, lakes, and seas are concentrated at polar latitudes, though valley networks are comparably more globally distributed (Miller et al. 2021). Alluvial fans are primarily found at Titan’s mid-latitudes (Birch et al. 2016). At both poles, Titan’s largest lakes, seas, and paleoseas concentrate on the eastern hemisphere, while most of the smaller lakes are on the opposite hemisphere (Birch et al. 2017). The largest cluster of small lakes are in Titan’s ‘Lake District’, a region elevated above the seas by 100’s of meters. Major regions and features are labeled, along with approximated locations of the Huygens lander and the Dragonfly landing site at Selk Crater. — astro-ph.EP

In this chapter we begin with a review of Titan’s fluvial and lacustrine landscapes as observed with Cassini remote sensing data, and what the many discoveries have revealed about Titan’s surface materials and climate.

Yet Cassini remote sensing data are coarse, topographic data are largely lacking, and the absence of in situ field measurements means we have little understanding of what the surface is composed of.

At present, our knowledge of Titan’s hydrology is comparable to that of Mars in the 1970’s during the Viking era. Fortunately, the coming decades promise many new and exciting discoveries that can be achieved through Earth-based experiments, numerical modeling, and a continued commitment to the exploration of Titan by future missions, including both Dragonfly and orbiting assets.

We therefore close the chapter with a discussion about what can be done with the current Cassini data and how new data, from both Dragonfly and a potential future orbiter, would allow us to leverage Titan to help solve some of the largest problems both here on Earth and on hydrologic planets and exoplanets more generally.

Diversity of lacustrine landscapes on Titan. (a) Ligeia Mare at Titan’s north, a largely flooded sea, with tentative evidence of wave-cut shorelines, pits, flooded valleys, and no obvious river deltas. (b) Ontario Lacus at Titan’s south, with pits along its perimeter and seafloor and, most notably, the only evidence of putative depositional coastal landforms (Wall et al. 2010). (c) Jingpo Lacus at Titan’s north, a lake comparable in size to Ontario Lacus, typified by dozens of 5−10 kilometer pits along its shorelines and seafloor. — astro-ph.EP

Samuel P.D. Birch, Alexander G. Hayes, J. Taylor Perron

Comments: 26 pages, 7 figures
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2502.02556 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2502.02556v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.02556
Focus to learn more
Journal reference: Chapter 10 of book: “Titan after Cassini-Huygens”, Editors: Rosaly M.C. Lopes, Charles Elachi, Ingo Mueller-Wodarg, Anezina Solomonidou. Paperback ISBN: 9780323991612 Elsevier, 2025
Submission history
From: Samuel Birch
[v1] Tue, 4 Feb 2025 18:30:01 UTC (41,198 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02556
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