The glaciers of Ceres

Dear Phys.org

I've installed a "copy as plain text" extension for Chrome to prevent your truly staggeringly stupid "feature" of automatically including "read more at phys.org." when copying text from your otherwise decent website. I can only imagine that this oddity must have occurred due to an unfortunate drunken escaped that resulted in hiring a particularly unskilled donkey as a web designer, or something, because it makes literally no sense at all. You ought to fire that donkey at once.

Sincerely,

Me.

Anywho...


Because Ceres is made of both rock and ice, Sori pursued the theory that formations on the dwarf planet flow and move under their own weight, similar to how glaciers move on Earth. The formations' composition and temperature would affect how quickly they relax into the surrounding landscape. The more ice in a formation, the faster it flows; the lower the temperature, the slower it flows.

"Ceres' poles are cold enough that if you start with a mountain of ice, it doesn't relax," Sori said. "But the equator is warm enough that a mountain of ice might relax over geological timescales."

To prove the computer simulations had played out in reality, Sori scoured topographic observations from the Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres since 2015, to find landforms that matched the models. Across the 1 million square miles of Cerean surface, Sori and his team found 22 mountains including Ahuna Mons that looked exactly like the simulation's predictions. "The really exciting part that made us think this might be real is that we found only one mountain at the pole," Sori said. Though it is old and battered by impacts, the polar mountain, dubbed Yamor Mons, has the same overall shape as Ahuna Mons. It is five times wider than it is tall, giving it an aspect ratio of 0.2. Mountains found elsewhere on Ceres have lower aspect ratios, just as the models predicted: they are much wider than they are tall.

https://phys.org/news/2018-09-ceres-life-ice-volcano.html