00:00Did you know Mercury is shrinking?
00:05That's because even though it's closer than any other planet to the hottest thing around,
00:09the Sun, its insides are actually cooling down, and in turn shrinking, albeit slowly.
00:14That means that the outer shell of the planet has less core to cover, and it's causing it
00:17to get a bit wrinkly.
00:19Planetologists are calling these bunched up bits of mercurial crust thrust faults, because
00:23as the core shrinks, the crust is thrust upwards over itself creating a textured surface.
00:28Most of these escarpments are believed to be at least 3 billion years old.
00:32Determined by the number of impact craters, experts have been able to identify atop the
00:35thrusts.
00:36However, experts now suggest this process could be happening in real time as well.
00:40Not only because the Mariner probe first identified one of these planetary wrinkles back in 1974,
00:45and the Messenger probe finding many more as it orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015,
00:50but they have also found signs of these thrust faults having recent movement, even if they
00:53were initially overlapped billions of years ago.
00:56These areas show signs of what are called grab ends, or where the crust overlaps another
01:00part and stretches and cracks due to compression and drag at its overlapping point.
01:05Experts have found areas where this has happened at extremely shallow depths and in large numbers,
01:09suggesting the texturing of Mercury's surface occurred much more recently.
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