What do many baked goods and the planet Mercury have in common? They shrink as they cool.<\/p>\n
Evidence suggests that since it formed about 4.5 billion years ago<\/a>, Mercury <\/a>has continuously contracted as it has lost heat. And somewhat like a fresh-baked cookie or cheesecake, Mercury also cracks as it cools: Thrust faults<\/a> cut through the planet\u2019s rocky surface to accommodate the ongoing shrinking<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n By observing how faults have uplifted<\/a> parts of Mercury\u2019s surface<\/a>, researchers can begin to estimate how much Mercury has contracted since it formed. However, prior estimates have varied widely, suggesting that thanks to faulting resulting from cooling, Mercury\u2019s radius has shrunk by anywhere from about 1 to 7 kilometers.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n To resolve this discrepancy, Loveless and Klimczak<\/a>employed an alternative method for estimating shrinkage caused by cooling-induced faulting on Mercury.<\/p>\n Prior estimates all relied on a method that incorporates the length and vertical relief of uplifted landforms, but that produces different shrinkage estimates depending on the number of faults included in the dataset. In contrast, the new method\u2019s calculations are not reliant upon the number of faults<\/a>. Rather, it measures how much the largest fault in the dataset accommodates shrinkage, then scales that effect to estimate the total shrinkage.<\/p>\n The researchers used the new approach to analyze three different fault datasets: one including 5,934 faults, one including 653 faults, and one including just 100 faults. They found that no matter which dataset was used, their method estimated about 2 to 3.5 kilometers of shrinkage. Combining their results with prior estimates of additional shrinkage that may have been caused by cooling-induced processes other than faulting, the researchers concluded that since Mercury\u2019s formation, the planet\u2019s radius may have shrunk by a total of 2.7 to 5.6 kilometers.<\/p>\n The new estimates could help deepen the understanding of the long-term thermal history of Mercury. Meanwhile, the authors suggest, the same methodology could be used to investigate the tectonics of other planetary bodies, like Mars, that feature faults. This paper was published in AGU Advances. <\/a><\/p>\n This article was originally published in Eos.<\/a> Read the article here. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do many baked goods and the planet Mercury have in common? They shrink as they cool. Evidence…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3844],"tags":[70,413,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-352431","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115045880074167861","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}