Planetary scientists have long known that Mercury has been shrinking for billions of years.
Despite being the closest planet to the Sun, its interior has been cooling down as internal heat leaks away. This means that the rock of which it is composed must have contracted slightly in volume.
The first evidence of Mercury's shrinkage came in 1974 when the Mariner 10 mission transmitted pictures of kilometers-high scarps snaking their way for hundreds of kilometers across the terrain. Messenger, which orbited Mercury 2011-2015, showed many more"lobate scarps" in all parts of the globe. However, it was always clear that Mercury's scarps must be fairly ancient, because although they cut through some older craters, quite a few younger craters are superimposed upon the scarps and so the scarps must be older than those.The consensus view is that Mercury's scarps are mostly about 3 billion years old.
Getting a handle on the scale and duration of fault movements on Mercury is important, because we would not expect Mercury's thermal contraction to have entirely finished, even though this should be slowing down.Until now, evidence has been sparse. But our team found unambiguous signs that many scarps have continued to move in geologically recent times, even if they were initiated billions of years ago.
The grabens are less than 1km wide and less than about 100 meters deep. Such comparatively small features must be much younger than the ancient structure on which they sit, otherwise they would have already been erased from view by impacts tossing material across the surface in a process aptly named"
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