Beyond Elevation: New Metrics to Quantify the Relief of Mountains and Surfaces of Any Terrestrial Body

TL;DR

This paper introduces new gravity-based, datumless topographic metrics—dominance, jut, submission, and rut—that provide a more meaningful and universal way to quantify relief on Earth and other planetary bodies, overcoming elevation's limitations.

Contribution

It proposes novel relief measures based on gravity and surface data, enabling standardized comparisons of landforms across different planets and terrains.

Findings

New metrics describe vertical position relative to surroundings.

Metrics enable comparison of relief across planets.

Applicable to planetary science and geomorphology.

Abstract

Elevation has long been the standard for quantifying the relief of mountains and other landforms on Earth and beyond. Nevertheless, elevation has its limitations. By itself, a location's elevation reveals little about its vertical position relative to its surroundings, especially for seabed and extraterrestrial features. Furthermore, on planets and asteroids without a sea level, the zero-elevation datum is defined rather arbitrarily, making elevation values rather meaningless without also considering relative elevation differences. In light of these factors, this paper introduces new topographic measures based purely on gravity and the actual planetary surface, rather than on an arbitrary datum. Unlike elevation, the so-called datumless measures -- with the names of dominance, jut, submission, and rut -- each describe a different aspect about a location's vertical position relative to its surroundings. They can be used to objectively compare the relief of mountains and other landforms, including across different planets. The datumless measures may be of interest to planetary scientists seeking universally standardized measures of relief, Earth scientists seeking to correlate geomorphological properties with natural phenomena, as well as mountaineers and hobbyists seeking new ways to describe the wondrous landscapes of this universe.