The smallest planet in our solar system is even smaller. MercuryThe planet closest to the Sun has been cooling and shrinking for thousands of years, creating a giant scar (known as a scar) on its surface. foliate cliff) The rock surface buckles due to contraction.
Until now, geologists weren’t sure exactly when these faults formed, or whether Mercury continues to form new faults as it continues to cool.The new study was published October 2 in the journal natural earth science When they took a closer look at the cliffs, they found small cracks indicating that the cliffs had moved over the past 300 million years.
“Our team found clear signs that many cliffs continue to move even though they began geologically recently, even if they started billions of years ago,” said the researchers. the author stated. david rosaryGeologists from the UK’s Open University wrote in the following article: conversation. “This is similar to the wrinkles that form on an apple as it ages, but the apple shrinks as it dries, whereas Mercury shrinks as it cools,” Rosalie added.
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It provided a new close-up view of the team. NASA messenger spacecraftorbited Mercury for more than 10 years, from 2004 to 2015. The research team discovered a graben (a geological term for a small crack parallel to a fault line) right next to the foliated scarp. Rifts are formed by faults that try to bend solid rock. “If you try to bend your toast, it may crack in the same way,” Rosalie wrote. The research team has identified 48 rifts, and she has discovered as many as 244 likely rifts.
They determined the age of these rocks using information about “impact gardening,” or how quickly dust produced by meteor impacts blurs features on Mercury’s surface. The research team calculated that the graben is about 300 million years old, based on how blurry it is in the image.
Cliff movements can not only generate grabens but also cause “Mercury earthquakes.” This is very similar to the shaking we measured on the Moon and named “.moonquake“The moon is shrunken and wrinkled like Mercury, and we have lunar seismometers on the ground to prove it.
Unfortunately, Mercury does not have such a device, but in the future European Bepi Colombo Mission will begin orbiting the tiny planet in 2025, hopefully providing more information about Mercury’s geology, including high-resolution views of Mercury’s wrinkles. “The most detailed images may reveal rock imprints that may provide further evidence of recent earthquakes,” Rosalie wrote. I’m looking forward to finding out.