The Tectonics and Volcanism of Venus: New Modes Facilitated by Realistic Crustal Rheology and Intrusive Magmatism

TL;DR

This study uses advanced 2-D models with realistic crustal rheology and magmatism to explore Venus's unique tectonic and volcanic behavior, revealing new regimes like 'deformable episodic lid' and mechanisms for resurfacing without overturns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modeling approach incorporating realistic crustal rheology and intrusive magmatism to explain Venus's tectonics and mantle evolution, identifying new tectonic regimes and resurfacing mechanisms.

Findings

Weak crustal rheology leads to 'deformable episodic lid' regime.

Strong plumes can penetrate the basalt barrier causing global overturns.

A new 'stagnant episodic-volcanic-resurfacing' mechanism is proposed.

Abstract

To explain Venus' young surface age and lack of plate tectonics, Venus' tectonic regime has often been proposed to be either an episodic-lid regime with global lithospheric overturns, or an equilibrium resurfacing regime with numerous volcanic and tectonic activities. Here, we use global 2-D thermochemical convection models with realistic parameters, including rheology (dislocation creep, diffusion creep, and plastic yielding), an experiment-based plagioclase (An$_{75}$) crustal rheology, and intrusive magmatism, to investigate the tectonics and mantle evolution of Venus. We find that surface tectonics is strongly affected by crustal rheology. With a ''weak'' plagioclase-rheology crust, models exhibit episodic overturns but with continuously high surface mobility and high distributed surface strain rates between overturns, leading to a new tectonic regime that we name ''deformable episodic lid''. On the other hand, olivine-crustal-rheology models exhibit either standard episodic-lid tectonics, i.e. with mobility that is high during overturns and near zero between overturns, or stagnant-lid tectonics, i.e. with near-zero mobility over the entire model time. Also, a combination of plagioclase crustal rheology and dislocation creep can weaken the lithosphere sufficiently to facilitate lithospheric overturns without applying plastic yielding. Internally, the composition-dependent density profile results in a ''basalt barrier'' at the mantle transition zone, which strongly affects Venus' mantle evolution. Only strong plumes can penetrate this basalt barrier and cause global lithospheric overturns. This basalt barrier also causes global internal episodic overturns that generate global volcanic resurfacing in stagnant-lid models, which suggests a new resurfacing mechanism (we name it ''stagnant episodic-volcanic-resurfacing'') that does not involve lithospheric overturns.