Uruk sulcus

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Uruk Sulcus is the longest tectonically formed furrow system ( sulcus ) on Jupiter's moon Ganymede . It is a 500 to 700 km wide, more than 2000 km long system of parallel, shallow ditches in the crust built up by water ice and rock admixtures.

The sulcus runs just north of the equator between the two dark, crater-rich areas Galileo Regio and Marius Regio and stands out clearly from them with its bright, parallel band structure. The lunar crust was tectonically stretched here in its early days by the tidal effects of the huge mass of Jupiter.

The shallow depth of this and other sulci is due to the porous crust material of the ice moon , which partially filled the joints from below.

literature

  • Patrick Moore et al .: Atlas of the Solar System (chapter Jupiter's moons). 465 pp., Herder-Verlag Freiburg-Basel-Vienna 1986
  • Heather Couper , Robert Dinwiddie et al .: The Planets. A journey through our solar system (Chapter Ganymede). 256 pp., Dorling Kindersley Verlag, Munich 2015
  • R.Pappalardo, R.Neukum et al .: Grooved Terrain on Ganymede: First Results from Galileo High-Resolution Imaging . Icarus 135/1 , Elsevier 1998