Experiments On Sublimating Carbon Dioxide Ice And Implications For Contemporary Surface Processes On Mars

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 94%. (I'm a bot)

Pits, which are visually comparable to Martian linear gully primary terminal pits, were observed to form via both the stationary and sliding interaction between sublimating CO2 ice and substrate of all grain sizes.

Primary pits and detached impact pits formed during our experiments by the interaction between sublimating CO2 ice and granular substrate.

Further work may clarify the extent to which ice thickness and surface topography influence pressure gradients at furrow and dendritic trough locations on Mars.Impact and Collapsed Pit Formation.

We observed a trend in Russell Crater and Matara Crater detached pit data, which suggests that the abundance of these multiple detached pits at linear gully termini increases with the surface area of the newest/widened terminal pit.

3e. Similar morphologies have yet to be identified on Mars, but it is possible that inset pits seen inside terminal pits may denote locations where blocks have burrowed beneath the surface.

The ratio of collapsed to impact pits in our laboratory experiments ranged from 5.3-10 and the ratios of inset pits to smallest detached pits in Russell Crater ranged from 4.3-8.1 and so certainly for the smaller detached pits in this setting, our proposed process is plausible.

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