Volcanic Mercury

 

The Alvin Rupes scarp on Mercury. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

The Alvin Rupes scarp on Mercury. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington


Apr 18, 2014

Was the innermost planet once wracked by explosive vulcanism?

The MESSENGER spacecraft has been a satellite of Mercury for a little more than three years. Its arrival on March 18, 2011 marked one of the longest voyages to cover the shortest distance of any mission. MESSENGER flew by Venus twice, once past Earth, and then three times past Mercury before settling-in to its first orbit.

According to a recent press release, planetary scientists believe that Mercury experienced violent, explosive volcanic eruptions that lasted for billions of years. They base their findings on what they refer to as “pyroclastic ash” inside unusual looking structures on Mercury’s surface. The so-called “volcanic vents” are thought to be the remains of sites where volatile gases, mixed with magma from deep below the planet’s crust, caused vulcanism to create the surface formations that are visible today.

The Alvin Rupes scarp (in the image at the top of the page), is just one of the large uplift regions that are reported examples of those formations. MESSENGER mission scientists use the Terror Rupes scarp as their primary example, however. Other cases in point are areas where pyroclastic ash has been identified in the bottoms of what, on Earth, would be called volcanic caldera.

On Earth, volcanoes can sometimes explode because of gases like carbon dioxide and volatiles like water vapor are dissolved in the magma. As theories suggest,  pressure on the magma decreases when it rises to the surface, so those compounds can cause Earth’s crust to “burst like an overinflated balloon”. Difficulties with Earth-based volcanic theories notwithstanding, such compounds are only inferred on Mercury, since no direct observation of its surface materials has been conducted. The pyroclastic materials are said to be similar to those found on Earth’s Moon, and because Earth’s Moon is also thought to have undergone a phase in its history when it was in a molten state, with resulting widespread volcanoes, the conclusion is that what is seen on Mercury must also be due to the same process.

Again, problems with lunar selenology are not the topic of this paper. The fact that the Moon and Mercury have most likely been affected by almost identical forces in their histories is not denied by Electric Universe advocates. What is denied is the way those histories evolved. The Moon is 3475 kilometers in diameter, while Mercury is 4880 kilometers, but it appears that they both experienced catastrophes at some time in the past. It is those catastrophic events that created the anomalous formations on both bodies.

The pyroclastic vents on Mercury show that electrical activity is responsible for their existence and not volcanoes. There are domed craters associated with several of them. The burned and blasted appearance is because electric arcs carved them out, leaving asymmetrical depressions, often with fulgurites embedded in their sidewalls. Fulgurites are the fused, sometimes brachiated, “fossils” of lightning bolts impacting a surface, leaving behind a hardened representation of the discharge channel.

As rocky bodies, like Mercury or the Moon, are ejected from larger, highly charged objects, they are bombarded with what can only be described as gigantic lightning bolts. The electric charges between the newly emergent planet or moon and its parent are not in equilibrium, so arcing takes place as they rapidly move away from each other. That is why so many celestial objects in the Solar System are seriously damaged. Craters, canyons, melted plains, scattered fields of scorched debris, and ionically deposited piles of finely divided dust tell the story of violent birth spasms, while providing evidence for a familial relationship.

Since an electric arc is composed of rotating filaments, if electricity were involved in Mercury’s evolution, it would have manifested in many ways. One of those ways would be to act like a plasma “drill bit,” cutting steep crater sidewalls, while sometimes leaving a “pinched up” mound in the center. Multiple filaments would cut one crater within another, often with one or more craters on the rims. Those conditions are visible in almost every image that the MESSENGER cameras have returned.

Stephen Smith

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