Venusian Channel Formation As A Subsurface Process |
Venusian Channel Formation As A Subsurface Process |
Guest_AlexBlackwell_* |
Jan 27 2006, 04:38 PM
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#1
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Guests |
There's a new and interesting preprint at JGR-Planets in Press:
Lang, Nicholas P.; Hansen, Vicki L. — January 2006 Venusian channel formation as a subsurface process (2005JE002629) PDF [8.7 Mb] |
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Jan 27 2006, 05:04 PM
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#2
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
Cool -- a paper that contradicts the assumption central to my Master's thesis
The observation central to this work is: there are lots of channels on Venus but if you look at the topography along them, they don't go from uphill to downhill; they undulate a lot. The assumption I used in my thesis was one first suggested by Goro Komatsu and Vic Baker: that the channels could be used as a marker of paleo-flatness, so you could learn something about what's happened in Venus tectonics since the channels formed by examining how topography along channels differs from flatness. This paper says, no, the channels formed that way, because they didn't form on the surface, they formed below the surface at the interface between the plains lavas and some other layer. I'll be very curious to see if they present this at this year's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference and what the other people in the Venus community think about it. But it may be hard to get an unbiased opinion. Vicki Hansen (second author on this paper, the first author is very likely a Ph.D. student of hers) has long represented one polar extreme in an extremely, nastily polarized debate about how to interpret geology from Magellan SAR images; the other pole was occupied by my graduate advisor, Jim Head, and his coworker Alexander ("Sasha") Basilevsky. After witnessing one particularly ugly and non-constructive debate between these two poles at an LPSC meeting, one of my fellow students (Geoff Collins, now a professor at Wheaton) summed up their debate: "I feel like Sasha is arguing 'Can't you see the forests around you?' while Vicki is shouting 'No, no! There are only trees!'" --Emily -------------------- My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.
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Jan 27 2006, 05:07 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
QUOTE (elakdawalla @ Jan 27 2006, 12:04 PM) Emily, how did you decide to choose this topic for your thesis? Is it available online? Thank you. This does explain your image symbol, at least. -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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Jan 27 2006, 05:38 PM
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#4
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
QUOTE (ljk4-1 @ Jan 27 2006, 09:07 AM) Emily, how did you decide to choose this topic for your thesis? Is it available online? Thank you. I went to my archives, blew the dust off the CDs, and uploaded the text and figures to a site where you can download them if you really care. It wasn't ever finished far enough to be ready to be submitted for publication, though it was being formatted as a JGR paper, so it's very much a draft, but have at it! It's not doing anybody any good not being read. It's questionable though whether it will do anybody any good being read -- it's only been "peer reviewed" by my advisors. The topic was suggested by my advisor. I did the mapping work with Jim and Sasha (though I had to teach myself how to do the GIS stuff with lots of help from various tech support people), then there's a whole section on geophysics that I did with Marc Parmentier. The paper: Understanding the tectonic history of the Baltis Vallis region, Venus, from observations of canali topography (PDF, 60 k) The figures (PDF) (WARNING! 14 MB!!) QUOTE (ljk4-1 @ Jan 27 2006, 09:07 AM) I figured nobody would understand what the canale was if I tried to stick one in the space allotted for an icon; those gorgeous Venus craters are second best! --Emily -------------------- My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.
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