Evaluating magma ascent at pavonis mons, mars using stress from flexure

Introduction: Pavonis Mons has a number of concentric volcanotectonic features, such as grabens, collapse pits, and rilles, that surround the flank of the edifice. Many of these features are likely the surface manifestations of buried dikes where the dike hits a buried layer of ice and the volatiles in that layer are volatilized and out-gassed [6]. Pavonis Fossae (Figure 1) is the largest of these concentric features and will be the subject of this abstract. One of the main controls on the location of them is the local stress field, as magma and fractures will want to propagate along the principle axis of least compressive stress, i.e. most tensile. Therefore, where we see tensile stress is where we expect to see these features from on the surface. For Tharsis, specifically Pavonis, the largest control on this stress field comes from lithospheric flexure due to top-loading. The amount the lithosphere bends is controlled by the elastic thickness of the lithosphere (Te), as tensile stresses from the bending of a rigid plate will occur further from the edifice as the thickness increases [7,8].