The collapse of large impact craters requires a temporary reduction in the resistance to shear deformation of the target rocks. One explanation for such weakening is acoustic fluidization, where impact-generated pressure fluctuations temporarily and locally relieve overburden pressure facilitating slip. A model of acoustic fluidization widely used in numerical impact simulations is the Block model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Galileo mission to Jupiter revealed that Europa is an ocean world. The Galileo magnetometer experiment in particular provided strong evidence for a salty subsurface ocean beneath the ice shell, likely in contact with the rocky core. Within the ice shell and ocean, a number of tectonic and geodynamic processes may operate today or have operated at some point in the past, including solid ice convection, diapirism, subsumption, and interstitial lake formation.
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