"Venus has a crust that is all one piece, with no evidence for subduction caused by plate tectonics like on Earth,” said Dr. Justin Filiberto, deputy chief of NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.Dr. Filiberto and his colleagues used modeling to determine that its crust is about 25 miles thick on average and at most 40 miles thick.
“That is surprisingly thin, given conditions on the planet,” Dr. Filiberto said.
“It turns out that, according to our models, as the crust grows thicker, the bottom of it becomes so dense that it either breaks off and becomes part of the mantle or gets hot enough to melt. So, while Venus has no moving plates, its crust does experience metamorphism. This breaking off or melting can put water and elements back into the planet’s interior and help drive volcanic activity.”
This gives us a new model for how material returns to the interior of the planet and another way to make lava and spur volcanic eruptions.
It resets the playing field for how the geology, crust, and atmosphere on Venus work together."
SciNews