A retrospective analysis of planetary data has yielded a significant geological discovery on the solar system’s outer edge, revealing how icy debris behaves under weak gravity. In a study published in the journal Icarus titled “First geomorphological evidence of landslides on Pluto,” researchers systematically analyzed high-resolution imagery captured during NASA’s 2015 New Horizons flyby. The scientific team successfully identified six large-scale landslides situated along the steep inner walls of impact craters near Sputnik Planitia, the dwarf planet’s vast nitrogen-ice basin.
The detected features exhibit drop heights ranging from 1.5 to 2.2 kilometers and runout distances spanning 10.1 to 14.5 kilometers, with the largest landslide covering approximately 130 square kilometers. Strikingly, these masses traveled far relative to their vertical fall, indicating extremely low effective friction on Pluto’s surface. This mobility suggests that volatile nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices influence mass wasting differently than rocky materials on Earth. While similar geological phenomena were previously confirmed on Pluto’s moon, Charon, these mapped features provide the first direct proof of active downslope gravitational collapse on the dwarf planet itself. Scientists expect that further analysis of the flyby datasets will uncover more of these landslides. These natural experiments continue to reshape our understanding of geomorphology on the solar system’s most distant explored planetary frontiers.
