 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
>Return to Research
Tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets
In a previous life (my Ph.D. thesis), I worked on the use of gravity and topography data to constrain the state of topographic compensation and tectonic evolution of Venus. The general conclusions of this work included (a) That tesserae terrains are locally compensated and most-likely remnants of a previous tectonic regime that is no longer active on Venus, (b) That the topography on the rest of the planet is primarily a reflection of present-day dynamic stresses associated with mantle convection (1, 2, 3). In the course of this work, I developed a multi-resolution (wavelet-like) approach to deal with data sets that come provided in terms of spherical harmonic coefficients (e.g., topography, gravity, and global seismic tomography models). A separate page (Multi-scale analysis of geophysical fields) describes our activities that focus on a multi-resolution perspective to geophysical data analysis.
The approach we developed for Venus has subsequently been applied to other terrestrial planets including Earth (4) Mars (14) and the Moon.
Residual geoid of Venus after removal of a static topographic compensation model. To first order this map represents the vertical stresses associated with present-day convective flow in the Venusian mantle. Contours every 20 m, with positive and negative values shown by red and blue lines respectively. Highland rises are lightly shaded and highland plateaus and tesserae are darkly shaded. For more details, see refs 2 and 3.
14 Localized gravity/topography admittance and correlation spectra on Mars: Implications for regional and global evolution, McGovern P. J., S. C. Solomon, D. E. Smith,M. T. Zuber, M. Simons, M. A. Wieczorek, R. J. Phillips, G. A. Neumann, O. Aharonson, and J. W. Head, J. Geophys. Res., 107 (E12), 5136, doi: 10, 1029/2002JE001854, 2002,; Correction, J. Geophys. Res.,109, E07007, doi:10.1029/2004JE002286, July 2004, [PDF]
4 Localization of the gravity field and the signature of glacial rebound, M. Simons and B. H. Hager, Nature, 390, 500-504, 1997. [PDF]3 Localization of gravity and topography: Constraints on the tectonics and mantle dynamics of Venus, M. Simons, S. C. Solomon, and B. H. Hager, Geophys. J. Int., 131, 24-44, 1997.
2 Global variations in the geoid/topography admittance of Venus, M. Simons, B. H. Hager, and S. C. Solomon, Science, 264, 798-803, 1994. [PDF]
1 Plains tectonics on Venus: The deformation belts of Lavinia Planitia, S. W. Squyres, D. G. Jankowski, M. Simons, S. C. Solomon, B. H. Hager, and G. E. McGill, J. Geophys. Res., 97, 13579-136000, 1992.
Mark Simons' Paper Collection: Entire paper including figures are all made available online (within the bounds of copyright restrictions).
