Convection of Venus and Enceladus, two regimes, one model

Séminaire IPAG de Antoine Rozel (Univ. Roma), jeudi 15 novembre 2012 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

The charaterization of the surface of Venus indicates an homogeneous age of 500 to 700 Myrs. This observation suggests that the lithosphere of the planet may have experienced a catastrophic overturn after a sudden lithosphere distabilisation. The mechanisms involved in this event are still largely misunderstood. Enceladus, an icy satellite of Saturn, presents a very important heat flux in its south pole. Though some significant heating may be explained by tidal dissipation, no model has been able to explain this observation in a self-consistent way. I will present a new thermodynamical model of dynamic recrystallization applied to both the rheology of ice and peridotite which allows me to propose a fully self-consistent explanation for these two mysterious convection regimes in a large range of parameters. A brief presentation of various projects will follow : detection of surface craterisation and mineralogy applied to Mars (using neural networks) and a new formalism of adaptive mesh refinement, easily parallelisable.