This chapter reviews the conditions under which the basic landforms of Venus formed, interprets their nature, and analyzes their local, regional, and global age relationships. The strong greenhouse effect on Venus causes hyper-dry, almost stagnant near-surface environments. These conditions preclude water-driven, and suppress wind-related, geological processes; thus, the common Earth-like water-generated geological record of sedimentary materials does not currently form on Venus. Three geological processes are important on the planet: volcanism, tectonics, and impact cratering. The small number of impact craters on Venus (~1,000) indicates that their contribution to resurfacing is minor. Volcanism and tectonics are the principal geological processes operating on Venus during its observable geologic history.
Landforms of the volcanic and tectonic nature have specific morphologies, which indicate different modes of formation, and their relationships permit one to establish their relative ages. Analysis of these relationships at the global scale reveals that three distinct regimes of resurfacing comprise the observable geologic history of Venus: (1) the global tectonic regime, (2) the global volcanic regime, and (3) the network rifting-volcanism regime. During the earlier global tectonic regime, tectonic resurfacing dominated. Tectonic deformation at this time caused formation of strongly tectonized terrains such as tessera, and deformational belts. Exposures of these units comprise ~20% of the surface of Venus. The apparent beginning of the global tectonic regime is related to the formation of tessera, which is among the oldest units on Venus. The age relationships among the tessera structures indicate that this terrain is the result of crustal shortening. During the global volcanic regime, volcanism overwhelmed tectonic activity and caused formation of vast volcanic plains that compose ~60% of the surface of Venus. The plains show a clear stratigraphic sequence from older shield plains to younger regional plains. The distinctly different morphologies of the plains indicate different volcanic formation styles ranging from eruption through broadly distributed local sources of shield plains to the volcanic flooding of regional plains. The density of impact craters on units of the tectonic and volcanic regimes suggests that these regimes characterized about the first one-third of the visible geologic history of Venus. During this time, ~80%–85% of the surface of the planet was renovated. The network rifting-volcanism regime characterized the last two-thirds of the visible geologic history of Venus. The major components of the regime include broadly synchronous lobate plains and rift zones. Although the network rifting-volcanism regime characterized ~2/3 of the visible geologic history of Venus, only 15%–20% of the surface was resurfaced during this time. This means that the level of endogenous activity during this time has dropped by about an order of magnitude compared with the earlier regimes.
Article
The Surface of Venus
M.A. Ivanov and James W. Head
Article
changing landscapes, natural causes of
John Bintliff
The classical world witnessed many forms of landscape change in its physical geography, mostly due to longer-term geological and climatological processes, whilst only a minority were due purely to human action. The physical environment of Greek and Roman societies saw alterations through earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, erosion, and alluviation.
Already in Greek antiquity, Plato (Critias iii) observed how the Aegean physical landscape was being worn down over time as erosion from the uplands filled the lowland plains. Indeed, the Mediterranean region is amongst the most highly erodible in the world.1 However, scientific research in the field known as geoarchaeology has revealed a more complex picture than a continuous degradation of the ancient countryside.2
To uncover a more realistic picture of Mediterranean landscape change, the element of timescales proves to be central, and here the framework developed by the French historian Fernand Braudel3 provides the appropriate methodology. Braudel envisaged the Mediterranean past as created through the interaction of dynamic forces operating in parallel but on different “wavelengths” of time: the Short Term (observable within a human lifetime or less), the Medium Term (centuries or more, not clearly cognisant to contemporaries), and the Long Term (up to as much as thousands or millions of years, not at all in the awareness of past human agents).
Article
Icy Satellites: Interior Structure, Dynamics, and Evolution
Francis Nimmo
This article consists of three sections. The first discusses how we determine satellite internal structures and what we know about them. The primary probes of internal structure are measurements of magnetic induction, gravity, and topography, as well as rotation state and orientation. Enceladus, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and (perhaps) Pluto all have subsurface oceans; Callisto and Titan may be only incompletely differentiated. The second section describes dynamical processes that affect satellite interiors and surfaces: tidal and radioactive heating, flexure and relaxation, convection, cryovolcanism, true polar wander, non-synchronous rotation, orbital evolution, and impacts. The final section discusses how the satellites formed and evolved. Ancient tidal heating episodes and subsequent refreezing of a subsurface ocean are the likeliest explanation for the deformation observed at Ganymede, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Miranda, Ariel, and Titania. The high heat output of Enceladus is a consequence of Saturn’s highly dissipative interior, but the dissipation rate is strongly frequency-dependent and does not necessarily imply that Saturn’s moons are young. Major remaining questions include the origins of Titan’s atmosphere and high eccentricity, the regular density progression in the Galilean satellites, and the orbital evolution of the Saturnian and Uranian moons.
Article
Mantle Convection in Terrestrial Planets
Elvira Mulyukova and David Bercovici
All the rocky planets in our solar system, including the Earth, initially formed much hotter than their surroundings and have since been cooling to space for billions of years. The resulting heat released from planetary interiors powers convective flow in the mantle. The mantle is often the most voluminous and/or stiffest part of a planet and therefore acts as the bottleneck for heat transport, thus dictating the rate at which a planet cools. Mantle flow drives geological activity that modifies planetary surfaces through processes such as volcanism, orogenesis, and rifting. On Earth, the major convective currents in the mantle are identified as hot upwellings such as mantle plumes, cold sinking slabs, and the motion of tectonic plates at the surface. On other terrestrial planets in our solar system, mantle flow is mostly concealed beneath a rocky surface that remains stagnant for relatively long periods. Even though such planetary surfaces do not participate in convective circulation, they deform in response to the underlying mantle currents, forming geological features such as coronae, volcanic lava flows, and wrinkle ridges. Moreover, the exchange of material between the interior and surface, for example through melting and volcanism, is a consequence of mantle circulation and continuously modifies the composition of the mantle and the overlying crust. Mantle convection governs the geological activity and the thermal and chemical evolution of terrestrial planets and understanding the physical processes of convection helps us reconstruct histories of planets over billions of years after their formation.
Article
Tectonic Dynamics in the African Rift Valley and Climate Change
Uwe Ring
The East African Rift System (EARS) transecting the high-elevation East African plateau is one of the most outstanding rift systems on earth. Rifting was caused by a huge uprising mantle plume under East Africa. Two distinct rift branches are distinguished: an older, volcanically very active Eastern Branch and a younger, much less volcanic Western Branch. The Eastern Branch is generally characterized by high elevation, whereas the Western Branch comprises a number of deep rift lakes (e.g., Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malaŵi). These differences reflect different plate strengths, the latter of which are largely governed by differences in how the mantle plume interacted with the East African lithosphere. Much of the topography forming the East African plateau has been caused by the uprising mantle plume. The onset of topographic uplift in the EARS is poorly dated but preceded graben development, the latter of which commenced at ~24 Ma in the Ethiopian Rift, at ~12 Ma in Kenya, and at ~10 Ma in the Western Branch. Increased uplift of the East African plateau since ~15–10 Ma might be connected to climate change in East Africa and human evolution. East Africa experienced cooling starting at 15.5–12.5 Ma that heralded profound faunal changes at 8–5 Ma, when the hominin lineage split from the chimpanzee lineage. The Pliocene is characterized by warm and wet climate between 5.3 and 3.3 Ma transitioning into a period of cooler and more arid conditions after ~3 Ma. The climate in the EARS is controlled by westerly monsoonal flow over equatorial West Africa and easterly monsoonal flow over the Indian Ocean. The uplifting East African plateau intercepted those winds and contributed to the increased aridification of East Africa.
Article
Element Partitioning (Mineral-Melt, Metal-/Sulfide-Silicate) in Planetary Sciences
Brandon Mahan
Element partitioning—at its most basic—is the distribution of an element of interest between two constituent phases as a function of some process. Major constituent elements generally affect the thermodynamic environment (chemical equilibrium) and therefore trace element partitioning is often considered, as trace elements are present in minute quantities and their equilibrium exchange reactions do not impart significant changes to the larger system. Trace elements are responsive to thermodynamic conditions, and thus they act as passive tracers of chemical reactions without appreciably influencing the bulk reactions themselves. In planetary sciences, the phase pairs typically considered are mineral-melt, metal-silicate, and sulfide-silicate, owing largely to the ubiquity of their coexistence in planetary materials across scales and context, from the micrometer-sized components of meteorites up to the size of planets (thousands of kilometers).
It is common to speak of trace elements in terms of their tendency toward forming metallic, sulfidic, or oxide phases, and the terms “siderophile,” “chalcophile,” and “lithophile” (respectively) are used to define these tendencies under what is known as the Goldschmidt Classification scheme. The metric of an element’s tendency to concentrate into one phase relative to another is expressed as the ratio of its concentration (as a weight or molar fraction) in one phase over another, where convention dictates the reference frame as solid over liquid, and metal or sulfide over silicate; this mathematical term is the element’s partition coefficient, or distribution coefficient, between the two respective phases,
D
M
Phase
B
Phase
A
(where
M
is the element of interest, most often reported as molar fraction), or simply
D
M
. In general, trace elements obey Henry’s Law, where the element’s activity and concentration are linearly proportional. Practically speaking, this means that the element is sufficiently dilute in the system such that its atoms interact negligibly with one another compared to their interactions with major element phases, and thus the trace element’s partition coefficient in most settings is not appreciably affected by its concentration.
The radius and charge of an element’s ionized species (its ionic radius and valence state)—in relation to either the major element ion for which it is substituting or the lattice site vacancy or interstitial space it is filling—generally determine the likelihood of trace element substitution or vacancy/interstitial fill (along with the net charge of the lattice space). The key energy consideration that underlies an element’s partitioning is the Gibbs free energy of reaction between the phases involved. Gibbs free energy is the change in internal energy associated with a chemical reaction (at a given temperature and pressure) that can be used to do work, and is denoted as
Δ
G
rxn
. Reactions with negative
Δ
G
rxn
values are spontaneous, and the magnitude of this negative value for a given phase, for example, a metal oxide, denotes the relative affinity of the metal toward forming oxides. That is to say, an element with a highly negative
Δ
G
rxn
for its oxide species at relevant pressure-temperature conditions will tend to be found in oxide and silicate minerals, that is, it will be lithophile (and vice versa for siderophile elements).
Trace element partitioning systematics in mineral-melt and metal-/sulfide-silicate systems have boundless applications in planetary science. A growing collective understanding of the partition coefficients of elements has been built on decades of physical chemistry, deterministic theory, petrology, experimental petrology, and natural observations. Leveraging this immense intellectual, technical, and methodological foundation, modern trace element partitioning research is particularly aimed at constraining the evolution of plate tectonics on Earth (conditions and timing of onset), understanding the formation history of planetary materials such as chondrite meteorites and their constituents (e.g., chondrules), and de-convolving the multiply operating processes at play during the accretion and differentiation of Earth and other terrestrial planets.
Article
An Environmental History of Southern Africa
Jasper Knight
Southern Africa has experienced significant environmental changes since the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent, starting around 180 million years ago. These environmental changes broadly reflect the interplay between tectonic and global-scale climatic drivers, which in combination result in changes to the properties and dynamics of land surface physical and ecological processes. The preserved record of such processes can be used as proxy indicators to reconstruct past environments and climates.
In southern Africa, different types of proxy indicators have formed and are preserved in different geographical areas, broadly corresponding to their individual climatic and geomorphic contexts. Three significant time intervals over which landscape evolution have taken place are the Phanerozoic, the late Quaternary, and the last 200 years.
A critical outcome of this analysis is that the record of environmental change in southern Africa is highly variable and only partly preserved, and that there are spatial and temporal gaps which mean that it is difficult to construct a continuous or unambiguous environmental history either for all areas of the region or for all time intervals. Changing physical drivers and environmental controls over time, including land surface feedbacks, are now being supplanted by a stronger imprint of human activity in the Anthropocene.
Article
Earthquakes in Political, Economic, and Cultural History
Andrew Robinson
The immediate aftermath of a great urban earthquake is a dramatic and terrible event, comparable to a massive terrorist attack. Yet the shocking impact soon fades from the public mind and receives surprisingly little attention from historians, unlike wars and human atrocities. In 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake and its subsequent fires demolished most of Tokyo and Yokohama and killed around 140,000 Japanese: a level of devastation and fatalities comparable with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But the second event has infinitely more resonance in public consciousness and historical studies than the first. Indeed, most people would be challenged to name a single earthquake with an indisputable historical impact, including even the most famous of all earthquakes: the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.
In truth, however, great earthquakes, from ancient times—as recorded by Greek and biblical writers—to the present day, have had major cultural, economic, and political consequences—often a combination of all three—some of which were beneficial. Thus, the current prime minister of India owes his election in 2014 to an earthquake that devastated part of his home state of Gujarat in 2001, which led to its striking economic growth. The martial law imposed on Tokyo and Yokohama after the 1923 earthquake gave new authority to the Japanese army, which eventually took over the Japanese government and led Japan to war with China and the world. The destruction of San Francisco in 1906 produced a boom in rebuilding and financial and technological development of the surrounding area on the San Andreas Fault, including what became Silicon Valley. A great earthquake in Venezuela in 1812 was the principal cause of the temporary defeat of its leader Simon Bolivar by the Spanish colonial regime, but his subsequent exile led to his permanent freeing of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela from Spanish rule. The catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755—as well known in the early 19th century as the 1945 atomic bombings are today—was a pivotal factor in the freeing of Enlightenment science from Catholic religious orthodoxy, as epitomized by Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide, written in response to the earthquake. Even the minor earthquakes in Britain in 1750, the so-called Year of Earthquakes, produced the earliest scientific understanding of earthquakes, published by the Royal Society: the beginning of seismology.
The long-term impact of a great earthquake depends on its epicenter, magnitude, and timing—and also on human factors: the political, social, intellectual, religious, and cultural resources specific to a region’s history. Each earthquake-struck society offers its own particular lesson, and yet, taken together, such earth-shattering events have important shared consequences for the history of the world.
Article
Great Earthquakes on Plate Boundaries
Thorne Lay
Earthquakes involve sudden shear sliding motion between large rock masses across internal contact surfaces called faults. The slip on the fault releases strain energy previously stored in the surrounding rock that accumulated due to frictional resistance to sliding. Most earthquakes are directly caused by plate tectonics, and locate in the cool, brittle rock near Earth’s surface. Events with seismic magnitude measured 8.0 or greater are called great earthquakes and involve slip of from several to tens of meters across faults with lengths from 100 to more than 1,000 kilometers. These huge ruptures tend to occur on or near plate boundaries; the largest are on shallow-dipping plate boundary faults (megathrusts) found in compressional regions called subduction zones, where one tectonic plate is thrusting under another. Some great earthquakes occur within bending or detaching plates as they deform seaward of or below a subduction zone. Yet others occur on plate boundary strike-slip faults where two plates are shearing horizontally past one another, or within deforming plate interiors. Elastic wave energy released during the fault sliding is recorded and studied by seismologists to determine the fault location, orientation and sense of sliding motion, amount of radiated elastic wave energy, and distribution of slip on the fault during the event (co-seismic slip). Geodetic methods measure elastic strain accumulation prior to an earthquake, co-seismic slip, and afterslip on the fault that occurs without earthquakes, along with viscous deformation of the mantle as it responds to the fault offset. Great earthquakes commonly locate under the ocean, and the sudden motion of the seafloor generates tsunami—gravitational water waves that can be recorded with ocean floor pressure sensors (these waves are also used to determine co-seismic slip). As seismic, geodetic. and tsunami modeling methods have progressed over the past 50 years, our understanding of great earthquake rupture processes and earthquake interactions has advanced steadily in the context of plate tectonics and improved understanding of rock friction. All faults have heterogeneous frictional properties inferred from non-uniform sliding during each event, with areas of large slip instabilities called asperities having slip-velocity weakening friction and other areas having slip-velocity strengthening friction that results in stable sliding. The seismic wave shaking and tsunami waves can cause great devastation for humanity, so efforts are made to anticipate future earthquake hazards. As plate tectonics steadily move Earth’s plates, elastic strain around plate boundary faults accumulates and releases in a repeated stick-slip sliding process that causes a limited degree of regularity of faulting. Given the history of prior earthquakes on a given fault, we can identify seismic gaps where future slip events are likely to occur. With geodesy we can also now measure locations of accumulating slip deficit relative to plate motions, as well as variation in seismic coupling, which characterizes the fraction of plate motion accounted for by earthquake failure.
