In 1960, Trusheim described three evolutionary stages of salt movement (pillow, diapir, and postdiapir) recorded in adjacent sediments by three types of peripheral sinks (primary, secondary, and tertiary). Assuming that overburden rocks were viscous, Trusheim interpreted such evolutionary stages as typical of buoyant Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. We use mechanical reasoning and physical models...

The “honeycomb” terrain is a Noachian-aged cluster of ∼7 km wide linear cell-like depressions located on the northwestern floor of Hellas basin, Mars. A variety of origins have been proposed for the honeycomb terrain, including deformation rings of subglacial sediment, frozen convection cells from a Hellas impact melt sheet, a swarm of igneous batholiths, salt diapirism, and ice diapirism. Rece...

When magma’inside a diapir solidifies it increases in density and becomes a stiff power-law fluid. If the diapir is still positively (or negatively) buoyant after solidification, it will continue to rise (or start to sink). The results presented here suggest that solidified diapirs may rise (sink) a distance of up to a few kilometres in geologically reasonable times. Rocks and bubbleand/or crys...

The Blake Ridge Diapir is the southernmost of a line of salt diapirs along the Carolina trough. Diapirs cause faulting of the superjacent sediments, creating pathways for migration of fluids and gas to the seafloor. We analyzed reflection seismic data from the Blake Ridge Diapir, which is located in a region with known abundant gas hydrate occurrence. A striking feature in these data is a signi...

Mount Sedom is the surface expression of a salt diapir that has emerged since the Pleistocene in the southwestern part of the Dead Sea basin. Milestones in the uplift history of the Sedom salt diapir since its inception were deduced from angular and erosional unconformities, thickness variations, caprock formation, chemistry and isotope composition of lacustrine aragonite, cave morphology, prec...

We present new evidence for the existence of a large pockmark field on the continental slope of the Santos Basin, offshore southeast Brazil. A recent high-resolution multibeam bathymetric survey revealed 984 pockmarks across a smooth seabed at water depths of 300-700 m. Four patterns of pockmark arrays were identified in the data: linear, network, concentric, and radial. Interpretation of Two-d...

Introduction: The south polar region of Enceladus, a small icy satellite of Saturn, consists of young, tectonically deformed terrain and has an anomalously high heat flux [1,2]. We find that the pole-centered location of this region can be explained by reorientation of Enceladus induced by a large, low-density ice diapir within a relatively thick ice mantle. Poleward reorientation requires that...

A giant impact is an increasingly popular explanation for the formation of the northern lowland on Mars. It is plausible that at the impact time both Mars and the impactor were differentiated with solid silicate mantles and liquid iron cores. Such a large impact likely resulted in merging of the cores of both bodies, a process which will have implications on the thermal state of the planet. We ...

Troodos is a classical ophiolite complex. It is proposed that the serpentinized harzburgites that now form the top of the mountain and represent the originally lowest part of the ophiolite sequence rose as a diapir. This diapiric rise is caused by the pervasive serpentinization of a suboceanic harzburgite, due to rock-sea water interaction. The serpentinization caused a 44% expansion of the roc...