Source: AGU Advances
Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
The Dawn mission discovered an unexpectedly youthful surface on Ceres, an ice-rich dwarf planet and the asteroid belt’s largest asteroid. Few ancient large impact basins, regions of thickened crust, large-scale fractures, and hemisphere-scale variations in gravity indicate a possible role for solid state convection in reshaping the crust. However, absent tidal heating, what long-lived source of energy might drive such resurfacing was unclear. King et al. [2022] show that sufficient heat can be generated simply by radioactive decay in certain geophysical regimes in which transient asymmetric upwelling sets up degree-one, i.e., hemispherical, convection. Small initial heterogeneities in temperature lead to long-term convective consequences. This process may also be active on other small solar system bodies, explaining hemisphere-scale resurfacing/tectonics on outer solar system icy moons.
Citation: King, S., Bland, M., Marchi, S., Raymond, C., Russell, C., Scully, J. & Sizemore, H. Ceres’ broad-scale surface geomorphology largely due to asymmetric internal convection. AGU Advances, 3, e2021AV000571. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000571
—Bethany Ehlmann, Editor, AGU Advances