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Crater Breach

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms

  • 14 Accesses

Synonyms

Breached crater; Breached-rim crater

Definition

A fluid-incised gap in a crater rim.

Description

Incisions through crater rims carved by inflows or outflows of water or lava. Crater rim cross-sections and breaches formed by outflowing fluid are often shaped like earthen-dam counterparts, i.e., the crater rim is triangular in cross section and the breach is trapezoidal (Wahl 1998; Coleman and Dinwiddie 2007).

Subtypes

  1. (1)

    Inlet/inflow/entrance crater breach, inlet channel (Fig. 1): The majority of Martian crater breaches are broadly of this type, although several genetic types are encompassed in the category, including breaches by single head-cut channels; breaches by headward extension of channel or valley networks (Irwin et al. 2005), through crater rims, the breaches themselves often incised by dendritic channel networks; rim breaching by lateral migration of adjacent channels (e.g., Enns et al. 2010); and breaches cut by overtopping flows from surrounding fluid-filled...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCD School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland

    Colman Gallagher

Authors
  1. Colman Gallagher
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Correspondence to Colman Gallagher .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Ames Research Center/NPP, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Henrik Hargitai

  2. Konkoly Thege Miklos Astronomical Institute, Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Ákos Kereszturi

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Gallagher, C. (2015). Crater Breach. In: Hargitai, H., Kereszturi, Á. (eds) Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3134-3_80

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