New global imaging and topographic（地形测量的） data from MESSENGER show that the innermost planet has contracted far more than previous estimates. The results are based on a global study of more than 5,900 geological landforms, such as curving cliff-like scarps and wrinkle ridges¹, that have resulted from the planet's contraction² as Mercury cooled. The findings, published online March 16, 2014, in Nature Geoscience, are key to understanding the planet's thermal³, tectonic, and volcanic⁴ history, and the structure of its unusually large metallic⁵ core. Unlike Earth, with its numerous tectonic plates, Mercury has a single rigid⁶, top rocky layer. Prior to the MESSENGER mission only about 45% of Mercury's surface had been imaged by a spacecraft. Old estimates, based on this non-global coverage⁷, suggested that the planet had contracted radially by about ½ to 2 miles (0.8 to 3 kilometers) substantially less than that indicated by models of the planet's thermal history. Those models predicted a radial contraction of about 3 to 6 miles (5 to 10 kilometers) starting from the late heavy bombardment of the Solar System, which ended about 3.8 billion years ago.

 

The new results, which are based on the first comprehensive survey of the planet's surface, show that Mercury contracted radially by as much as 4.4 miles (7 kilometers) -- substantially more than the old estimates, but in agreement with the thermal models. Mercury's modern radius⁸ is 1,516 miles (2,440 kilometers).

 

"These new results resolved a decades-old paradox⁹（悖论） between thermal history models and estimates of Mercury's contraction," remarked lead author of the study, Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist¹⁰ and MESSENGER visiting investigator¹¹ at Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism¹². "Now the history of heat production and loss and global contraction are consistent. Interestingly, our findings are also reminiscent of now-obsolete models for how large-scale geological deformation¹³ occurred on Earth when the scientific community thought that Earth only had one tectonic plate. Those models were developed to explain mountain building and tectonic activity in the nineteenth century, before plate tectonics theory."

 

Byrne and his coauthors identified a much greater number and variety of geological structures on the planet than had been recognized in previous research. They identified 5,934 ridges and scarps attributed to global contraction, which ranged from 5 to 560 miles (9 to 900 kilometers) in length.

 

The researchers used two complementary techniques to estimate the contraction from their global survey of structures. Although the two estimates of radius change differed by 0.6 to 1 mile (1 to 1.6 kilometers), both were substantially greater than old estimates.

 

"I became interested in the thermal evolution of Mercury's interior when the Mariner¹⁴ 10 spacecraft sent back images of the planet's great scarps in 1974-75, but the thermal history models predicted much more global contraction than the geologists¹⁵ inferred from the scarps then observed, even correcting for the fact that Mariner 10 imaged less than half of Mercury's surface," noted¹⁶ Sean Solomon, principal investigator of the mission, former director of Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, and current director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory¹⁷ at Columbia University. "This discrepancy¹⁸ between theory and observation, a major puzzle for four decades, has finally been resolved. It is wonderfully affirming to see that our theoretical understanding is at last matched by geological evidence."

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