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Smooth Plains

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms

Definition

Relatively level plains on a planetary surface that have fewer craters (and so are younger than) other plains regions on the same body.

Regional Variations (Description and Interpretation)

Mercury: Flat to gently rolling plains (Trask and Guest 1975) in low depressions (Fig. 1) such as Borealis Planitia and within and surrounding the Caloris Basin, occupying about 40 % of the surface. They were proposed to be volcanic lava flows or alternatively fluidized crater ejecta deposits (Wilhelms 1976; Grolier and Boyce 1984) analogous to the Cayley Formation on the Moon (light plains), which was wrongly thought to be volcanic until studied in situ by Apollo 16 (Young et al. 1972). There are few recognizable volcanic edifices even at MESSENGER resolution, thus implying flood-volcanism style (Head et al. 2009; Whitten et al. 2012), a contention supported by channels and tear-drop-shaped islands suggestive of sculpting by highly mobile, low-viscosity flows (Head et al. 2011). Some...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physical Sciences, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    David A. Rothery

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA, Planetary Ices Group, Pasadena, CA, USA

    J. Brad Dalton III

  3. Planetary Science Research Group, Eötvös Loránd University, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Henrik Hargitai

Authors
  1. David A. Rothery
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  2. J. Brad Dalton III
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  3. Henrik Hargitai
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Correspondence to David A. Rothery .

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Rothery, D.A., Dalton, J.B., Hargitai, H. (2014). Smooth Plains. In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_356-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_356-1

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