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Thick lithosphere casts doubt on plate tectonics in Venus’s recent past
A study of a giant impact crater on Venus suggests that its lithosphere was too thick to have had Earth-like plate tectonics, at least for much of the past billion years.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – At some point between 300 million and 1 billion years ago, a large cosmic object smashed into the planet Venus, leaving a crater more than 170 miles in diameter. A team of Brown University researchers has used that ancient impact scar to explore the possibility that Venus once had Earth-like plate tectonics.
For a study published in Nature Astronomy, the researchers used computer models to recreate the impact that carved out Mead crater, Venus’s largest impact basin. Mead is surrounded by two clifflike faults – rocky ripples frozen in time after the basin-forming impact. The models showed that for those rings to be where they are in relation to the central crater, Venus’s lithosphere – its rocky outer shell – must have been quite thick, far thicker than that of Earth. That finding suggests that a tectonic regime like Earth’s, where continental plates drift like rafts atop a slowly churning mantle, was likely not happening on Venus at the time of the Mead impact.

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