Simeon Wren Pluto: Icy Wasteland or Geological Marvel
Pluto : Icy Wasteland or Geological Marvel? By Simeon Wren
Pluto has long been thought of as
a tiny, barren dwarf-planet, almost 5 billion kilometres from Earth (Redd, 2016) with no real significance or interesting features. Since it was so far from Earth, before 2015 the only images of Pluto were no more than 10 grey and white pixels. However, all that changed after the New Horizons mission. For the first time, high-definition photographs of Pluto were taken, and they revealed some fascinating mysteries and many new details which completely contradicted previous beliefs. Some of the discoveries may even point towards the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. When the images were analysed, numerous unusual features were found which raised many questions.
A particularly large area of icy plains was found to be craterless (Duncan, 2020), a stark difference to the rest of Pluto’s surface. Scientists knew it was highly unlikely that this area did not receive any meteorite or asteroid impacts because there was no logical reason for it. Therefore, they compared Pluto to Earth. The Earth does not have many craters for two different reasons: one is that lots of geological activity on Earth. The tectonic plates shift, and rock sinks down into Earth’s mantle and melts. Any craters or other landforms in the rock eventually sink and melt and then molten rock rises to form new, craterless land. This was far more likely since Pluto doesn’t have an atmosphere, and there was other evidence to back it up.
Fig. 1&2: The patterns of the plains on Pluto (left). The shapes are very large (the features in the top left corner are mountains) and the boundaries between them are very strong and defined (Radford, 2016). The shapes on Pluto are very similar to those in stratocumulus clouds (right) caused by convection currents. (Lipke, 2017)
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