Interesting article. The channels they find do look more dendritic than most of the classic Noachan run off channels, widely thought to be caused by sapping rather than precipitation now, and they throw out a bunch of quantitative measures about branching, etc that they claim show a morphology like terrestrial river drainage basins.

Really cool to see the channels show up through thermal inertia differences in the nighttime IR images, though to be fair, most of what they found shows up in the daytime THEMIS as well. I think the press writeup exaggerated the degree to which they found "buried" channel networks, vs them making the point that there might be lots more of these to be found that are buried.

The thermal IR is certainly one way to get at them, but it would be interesting to see what imaging radar would reveal underneath the dust all over the planet.