Isostatic compensation of Ishtar Terra, Venus

Abstract

We have used spherical harmonic representations of the Venus topography and geopotential, obtained from Magellan data, to evaluate isostatic support in several areas within the Ishtar Terra highlands, including the Lakshmi plateau, its surrounding mountain belts, namely Akna and Freyja, and Maxwell Montes, and the Fortuna Tessera province. We find that topography in Ishtar is largely isostatically compensated (>80%). Regional geoid‐topography variations in the subregions can be explained by a combination of Airy (crustal thickening) and thermal (lithospheric thinning) mechanisms, provided Venus has a thick reference thermal lithosphere (∼300–400 km). With the exception of eastern Fortuna, low elevation areas (h < 3–4 km above the mean planetary radius, MPR) with large geoid‐topography ratios (GTR) seem to be associated, to various degrees, with thermal isostasy, whereas the higher areas (h > 4 km above MPR) with small GTRs are almost certainly Airy compensated via thickened crust. Relatively large (>60 km) total Airy crustal thicknesses obtained in the western Ishtar mountain belts, together with a probable basalt‐eclogite phase change, suggest a possible silicic composition for these structures, provided they are older than ∼25–50 Ma. Lakshmi Planum seems essentially thermally supported, with the thermal lithosphere thinned to ∼100 km. We suggest, as one possibility, that the lithospheric thinning process under Lakshmi is delamination of a dense eclogite lower lithosphere layer into the mantle. The decrease in GTR observed in Ishtar between Lakshmi to the west (GTR ∼ 20 m/km), Maxwell and west Fortuna (GTR ∼ 8 m/km), and eastern Fortuna (GTR ∼ 4 m/km) may correspond to a decay in thermal compensation attributed to lithospheric delamination, which would be fairly recent (∼100 Ma) in Lakshmi, partially decayed in west Fortuna, and absent in east Fortuna, where a mostly Airy‐supported topography is essentially relaxed with no thermal uplift. Alternatively, if surficial concentrations in radiogenic elements were prevalent throughout the crust, partial melting of a thickened crust could account for the thermal uplift in Lakshmi and west Fortuna. The zero‐elevation basaltic crustal thickness H ∼ 24 km obtained for the east Fortuna Tessera region may be representative of the ambient crustal thickness in the Venus lowlands. Our findings support multicomponent models for tectonic and volcanic activity in Ishtar. The thick ambient crust and thermal lithosphere implied by this study agree with observational constraints such as support of extreme elevations, large topographic slopes, unrelaxed craters, and the thick elastic lithosphere suggested by flexure studies. If the ambient thermal lithosphere on Venus were to be relatively thin (∼100–200 km), with a cold mantle and radiogenic elements concentrated in the crust, then thermal evolution on Venus may be in quasi‐steady state, with the geodynamic evolution in monotonic decline. However, if the ambient thermal lithosphere is very thick (∼300–400 km), as suggested by our thermal model fits, then it is consistent with the predictions of strongly unsteady state thermal evolution models and an interior which is currently heating up. This would support the view that catastrophic resurfacing on Venus might be episodic.