New Theory Explains Mercury's Mysterious Cliffs

[TechBear_Seattle]

New Theory Explains Mercury's Mysterious Cliffs

Mercury's surface is not only peppered with impact craters, but also wrinkled with mysterious chains of cliffs.

Scientists think the "lobate scarp" cliffs — some 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) high and hundreds of miles long — were created as Mercury's crust bunched up around its shrinking interior, something like a dried-out piece of fruit. A new theory, however, suggests that rising sheets of hot mantle rock popped out the planet's characteristic ridges, helping to create the cliffs.

"There's a preferred north-south alignment to these scarps," Scott King, a planetary geophysicist at Virginia Tech University, told SPACE.com. "If you just have a shrinking sphere, there's no reason they should be aligned. It should be fairly random."

Instead of just a shrinking crust, King thinks linear sheets of rock heaved on the planet's crust from below, pushing up the cliff-like features. He detailed his computer-modeled hypothesis in the March 16 online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

The full article is available at http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080325/sc_space/newtheoryexplainsmercurysmysteriouscliffs

[Orrex]

1. Does this have anything to do with Thimerosal?

:scared:

[Nihil]

2. One better than me ...