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Effect of solar insolation on the lithospheric thickness (in km) for a uniform heat flux F b = 40 mW/m 2 (h = 100 km, H = 0.065 µW/m 3 ). Mercury is in resonance 3:2.
Source publication
Lobate scarps on Mercury most likely result from planetary contraction but their non-random orienta-tions cannot be explained by a completely isotropic model. Besides the deformation due to despinning, an-other source of anisotropy is the spatial variation of the lithospheric thickness. Solar insolation and tidal heat-ing respectively lead to equat...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... a conductive temperature profile in the crust, we compute the effective elastic thickness (see Fig. 1) by the yield-strength envelope formalism [4]. The model depends on many parameters such as the crustal thickness h and the crustal heat generation H but the ones that interest us here are the surface tem- perature and the basal heat flux F b . The mean basal heat flux and the parameter H are chosen so that the brittle-ductile ...
Citations
... More- over tidal dissipation inside the inner core can provide a substantial heat contribution for driving convective motions, and with it a planetary dynamo, inside Mer- cury's liquid core. Finally, surface heat flow variations resulting from tidal heating can affect local lithosphere thickness variations and may result in distinctive tec- tonic patterns [2]. ...
... It remains to be investigated whether it can have an appreciable effect on Mercury's present thermal state. In any case, tidal heating has a neg- ligible effect on lithospheric thickness variations [2]. However, the tidally dissipated power could have been significantly larger when Mercury was rotating faster, and might have substantially contributed to the thermal state, orbital evolution, and surface tectonic patterns. ...
Tidal dissipation inside Mercury is expected to have significantly contributed to Mercury's internal thermal state and to its orbital evolution. The total dissipated power depends on the tidal potential and on the interior structure of Mercury. For two different tidal potentials and for a set of plausible interior structure models, we determine the total dissipated power and assess result-ing heat flow patterns at the surface and at the inner core surface.
