Building Mountains on Io

Details Building Mountains on Io Building Mountains on Io

Apr 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003eaeja....12166t&link_type=abstract

EGS - AGU - EUG Joint Assembly, Abstracts from the meeting held in Nice, France, 6 - 11 April 2003, abstract #12166

Computer Science

Scientific paper

Io has ~150 mountains and plateaus which exhibit a wide range of morphologies, but surprisingly, despite Io's incredible volcanic activity, most mountains appear to have tectonic origins. The mountains are, on average, several kilometers high and resemble uplifted, tilted, and fractured blocks. However, although some are bounded by paterae (volcano-tectonic depressions) or fractures along which volcanic activity is observed, lava flows or plumes have not been seen to issue from mountain summits. The mountains are generally isolated and they do not exhibit any strong global tectonic patterns. We are using finite-element analysis to investigate mechanisms for building and supporting Io's high mountains. Initially Io was thought to have a thin lithosphere in order to accommodate its high heat flow; however, this is inconsistent with the observed heights of Io's mountains, from which it was inferred that the lithosphere must be at least a few tens of kilometers thick. This paradox was resolved by O'Reilly and Davies (1981), who demonstrated that a high subsidence rate makes localized advective heat transfer effective to such an extent that the lithosphere can be arbitrarily thick. It is this high subsidence rate, comparable to the global average resurfacing rate of ~1 cm/yr, that may also be the key to mountain formation on Io. The decrease in surface area associated with reducing the radius of a spherical shell generates compressional stresses, which Schenk and Bulmer (1998) proposed to drive mountain building by thrust faulting. Our models have demonstrated the feasibility of this scenario for mountain formation. They also emphasize the need for a mechanism to localize mountain building to reproduce the isolation of the structures observed on Io. We have investigated interaction with mantle upwellings and are currently studying the roles of local variations in resurfacing rate and crustal thickness.

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