Jakarta –
Mercury, the smallest planet in the Solar System, is smaller than it should be. It’s like Mercury’s condition is like an apple that has wrinkled over time. The rock and molten metal cools so that the inside shrinks.
According to existing studies, this shrinkage causes wrinkles on the planet’s surface, which David Rothery later called scarps, aka wounds.
“This is like the wrinkles that form on an apple as it ages,” said Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the British Open University and author of the research, as quoted by detikINET from Insider, Thursday (12/10/2023).
ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
This scar is proof that Mercury is contracting. Then the problem is that this event is 3 billion years old.
To prove that this shrinkage was still ongoing, Rothery and his student Ben Man began to look at other geological structures called grabens.
Grabens, which appear once the scarps move, are beneficial for research. Apart from its smaller size, about 1 km long and under 100 meters deep, its age is not as old as the scarps, less than 300 million years.
“Because they are small, they won’t last long,” Rothery told Insider.
The study, published in Nature Geosciences on Monday, confidently identified 48 of 244 images of grabens taken by Nasa’s Messenger probe in 2015.
“That’s why we say clearly that there has been movement over the last three hundred million years, and it may still be happening today,” he said.
Meanwhile, this shrinkage causes the rigid outer part of Mercury to be pushed upwards, causing a Mercury earthquake.
“This displacement is up to several kilometers, equivalent to hundreds of very large earthquakes. We expect this to happen all the time, but we have no way to measure it until we get seismometers on this planet,” he concluded.
*This article was written by Khalisha Fitri, a participant in the Merdeka Campus Certified Internship Program at detikcom.
Watch the video “Scientists Say Humans Have Pushed Earth into the ‘Planetary Boundary’ Danger Zone”
[Gambas:Video 20detik]
(fyk/fay)
2023-10-12 15:36:38
#planet #Mercury #continues #shrink #whats
