Post contributed by Prof. Paul K. Byrne, Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Washington University in St. Louis, USA.

Venus is a tectonically tortured world (Image 1). Vast rift systems, widespread crustal shortening, and a crumpled terrain type, tessera, collectively attest to major tectonic activity on a world only a little smaller than Earth. In places, strains are spatially distributed; in others, extension or shortening is concentrated into narrow bands. And, where these bands intersect, they define a type of tectonic deformation on Venus that hasn’t been recognised before.

Image 1: A 1,100 km-wide, false-colour radar view of Lavinia Planitia, one of the lowland regions on Venus where the lithosphere has fragmented into blocks (purple) delineated by belts of tectonic structures (yellow). Image credit: Paul K. Byrne.