Massive landslides discovered on Pluto for the first time

A reanalysis of data from NASA’s New Horizons mission has revealed the first confirmed landslides on Pluto, adding the distant dwarf planet to the growing list of solar system bodies shaped by gravitational mass movements.

Six landslides near Sputnik Planitia

A team led by Marco Emanuele Discenza and Maria Teresa Brunetti, from the National Research Council of Italy in Perugia, re-examined high-resolution images captured during New Horizons’ historic 2015 flyby. Their analysis, published on June 13, 2026 in the journal Icarus, identified six large-scale landslide features along the inner rims of three impact craters, all clustered near the vast nitrogen-ice plain known as Sputnik Planitia.

Landslides are a common geomorphological feature throughout the solar system. They have been documented on rocky planets, moons such as Charon, asteroids like Vesta, and even comets. However, despite Pluto’s mountainous terrain and sufficient gravity to drive slope failures, no unambiguous evidence of landslides had been reported until now.

Scale and unusual mobility

The newly identified features are substantial. The largest covers approximately 130 square kilometers, an area roughly twice the size of Manhattan. Their vertical drop heights range from 1,500 to 2,200 meters, with runout lengths between 10.1 and 14.5 kilometers. While the drop heights are modest compared with landslides on Mars or other large bodies, the Plutonian landslides exhibit a striking property: they travel significantly farther horizontally relative to their height than comparable features elsewhere in the solar system.

This high mobility suggests that the material sliding down Pluto’s crater walls experiences unusually low friction. The finding is comparable to the most mobile landslides observed on Mars and Ceres, and it provides direct constraints on the mechanical properties of Pluto’s icy surface materials, which remain poorly understood.

Implications for planetary geomorphology

The discovery confirms that gravitational slope processes actively shape Pluto’s surface, extending the known reach of landslide geomorphology to the Kuiper Belt. As Brunetti noted, landslides play an important role in sculpting landscapes and redistributing material across planetary surfaces.

The team expects that Pluto harbors many more landslides beyond the six identified so far. Finding them will require further analysis of the existing New Horizons dataset and, ideally, future missions to the Pluto system.

The study is available as: M.E. Discenza et al., «First geomorphological evidence of landslides on Pluto,» Icarus, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2026.117210.

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© 2026 SKYCR.ORG | Homer Dávila Gutiérrez, FRAS. All rights reserved. No partial or total reproduction without express authorization. Original source: Icarus (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2026.117210