1/11 Volcanic eruptions have occurred on planetary bodies throughout the Solar System, including Mercury. Eruptions have different styles, which affect the volcanoes they build. Photo by C.G. Newhall.
2/11 On volcanic planets, the size of volcanoes is anti-correlated with their frequency; small volcanoes are much more numerous than large ones (photo by John Pallister, USGS).
3/11 On Earth, small-volume explosive eruptions, which occur because expanding gas bubbles in the magma fragment the erupting molten rock, can form piles of material called scoria cones (photo by Drtrotsky CC-BY-SA3.0).
4/11 Features resembling scoria cones have been observed on the Moon and Mars (on picture), but not yet on Mercury and the extreme scarcity of such volcanoes is a surprising fact (photo CTX).
5/11 We used computer simulations to calculate where rock chunks would accumulate during explosive eruptions with different eruption volumes, speeds, and angles, under Mercury gravity.
6/11 We found that, under most plausible scenarios, explosive eruptions on Mercury ejected material over too great an area to build a cone, but instead built gentle slopes that would be undetectable in data from the MESSENGER mission.
7/11 This is because Mercury has no atmosphere to reduce the maximum range of ejected rock and cause it to build up close to the vent (photo by NASA/JHUAPL/CIW).
8/11 We suggest that @BepiColombo , the next spacecraft to visit Mercury, should concentrate on searching for compositional, rather than topographical, evidence for explosive #volcanism.
9/11 We suggest that volcanic cones on the #Moon may have formed differently to scoria cones on #Earth, since the Moon also has no atmosphere (#NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University).
10/11 The full story is available in the paper just published in @grl (goo.gl/sJMbFa) so enjoy the reading ;)
11/11 And many thanks to @daverothery, @wrightplanet and Ondřej Čadek to help me out to write this story and to @ThePlanetaryGuy and Sebastien Besse to critically evaluate our work and hence help us to improve it :)!
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