Did you know Mercury is shrinking? That’s because even though it’s closer than any other planet to the hottest thing around, the Sun, its insides are actually cooling down and in turn shrinking albeit slowly.
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00:00Did you know Mercury is shrinking?
00:05That's because even though it's closer than any other planet to the hottest thing around,
00:09the Sun, its insides are actually cooling down, and in turn shrinking, albeit slowly.
00:14That means that the outer shell of the planet has less core to cover, and it's causing it
00:17to get a bit wrinkly.
00:19Planetologists are calling these bunched up bits of mercurial crust thrust faults, because
00:23as the core shrinks, the crust is thrust upwards over itself creating a textured surface.
00:28Most of these escarpments are believed to be at least 3 billion years old.
00:32Determined by the number of impact craters, experts have been able to identify atop the
00:35thrusts.
00:36However, experts now suggest this process could be happening in real time as well.
00:40Not only because the Mariner probe first identified one of these planetary wrinkles back in 1974,
00:45and the Messenger probe finding many more as it orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015,
00:50but they have also found signs of these thrust faults having recent movement, even if they
00:53were initially overlapped billions of years ago.
00:56These areas show signs of what are called grab ends, or where the crust overlaps another
01:00part and stretches and cracks due to compression and drag at its overlapping point.
01:05Experts have found areas where this has happened at extremely shallow depths and in large numbers,
01:09suggesting the texturing of Mercury's surface occurred much more recently.