Peculiar Planets

The Moon – A small but significant tale about impacts, basins, volcanism, and time

Editorial Team 2 March 25, 2020

View of the Moon taken by the Expedition 40 crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Image: JSC/NASA

This week on the GD Blog we are taking a magical geodynamicist’s mystery tour to our planet’s Moon thanks to Tobias Rolf, Researcher at the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the University of Oslo, Norway (currently a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Münster, Germany). Imagine you are orbiting the Earth at an altitude of a few hun ...[Read More]

The geodynamics of Enceladus: exotic and familiar

Editorial Team 3 September 11, 2019

Left: William and Caroline Herschel (http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0002731.html Wellcome Collection gallery). Right: Bosquet de l’Encelade, Versailles Castle (Wikipedia)

This week, Gael Choblet, CNRS research associate in the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique (University of Nantes and Angers), tells us everything about the interior of Enceladus, an interesting icy moon of Saturn! This is my first contribution in these pages. The choice of Saturn’s small moon Enceladus as a topic mostly results from my acquaintance with this planetary body. Yet, the reade ...[Read More]

Iron volcanism on metallic asteroids?

Editorial Team 3 July 10, 2019

A metallic asteroid with iron volcanism (Elena Hartley)

This week, Francis Nimmo, professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (University of California Santa Cruz), tells us about volcanism on metallic asteroids! Around and after the formation of the solar system (4.5 billion years ago onwards), volcanoes on some of the gigantic bodies of the asteroid belt might have erupted … iron. Explanations. One way in which we can learn abou ...[Read More]

Geodynamics in Planetary Science

Editorial Team 2 May 22, 2019

Credit: Modified by Iris van Zelst from Pixabay

It is a question that humankind has been asking for thousands of years: Are we alone in the Universe or are there other worlds like our own? As of today, it is unknown whether or not inhabited planets exist outside of our own solar system. With the discovery of the extrasolar planet 51 Peg b in 1992, it was confirmed that our sun is not the only star that hosts planets and therefore the search for ...[Read More]