core-mantle boundary tagged posts

A beautiful view of Mercury’s horizon. In this scene, which was acquired looking from the shadows toward the sunlit side of the planet, a 120-km (75 mi.) impact crater stands out near the center. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

NASA researchers have found that several volcanic deposits on Mercury’s surface require mantle melting to have started close to the planet’s core-mantle boundary, which lies only 400km below the planets surface and making it unique in the solar system. This is reported at the Goldschmidt conference in Yokohama, Japan. The recent MESSENGER mission to Mercury has shown that the surface of the planet is very heterogeneous, but it can be classified into 2 main types of regions...