Source: SPACE.COM
Scientists think the "lobate scarp" cliffs — some 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) high and hundreds of miles long — were created as Mercury's crust bunched up around its shrinking interior, something like a dried-out piece of fruit. A new theory, however, suggests that rising sheets of hot mantle rock popped out the planet's characteristic ridges, helping to create the cliffs. This hypothesis is the result of a computer-modeled hypothesis developed by Scott King, a planetary geophysicist at Virginia Tech University, that was published in the March 16 online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience. (Read more)
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