{"id":6512,"date":"2013-09-05T10:46:22","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T17:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/?p=6512"},"modified":"2021-01-18T01:36:08","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T09:36:08","slug":"professor-an-yin-uses-his-experience-on-earth-to-study-the-geology-of-other-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/?p=6512","title":{"rendered":"Prof. Yin investigates the geology of other worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
A topographic false-color map of Mars including some of the largest volcanoes and the largest canyon in the solar system. Image Credit: NASA\/JPL\/Caltech\/Arizona<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Few people can claim that their children learned to walk in the forests of Yosemite National Park.\u00a0 Professor An Yin, who has spent much of his 26 years at UCLA conducting fieldwork in Tibet, the Himalayas, and California, can.\u00a0 Having spent his graduate career investigating remote areas of Glacier National Park, Yin\u2019s mountaineering experience equipped him for the challenging Asian fieldwork and tectonic research that earned him the Donath Medal from the Geological Society of America. \u201cIt was a frontier in an area that was not explored before, despite it being on Earth,\u201d said Yin. \u201cKnowing almost nothing about this large area, I tried to make a synthesis.\u201d\u00a0 Nowadays, Yin spends less time in Tibet and the Himalayas, making only two trips a year, usually to drop off graduate students to conduct their own fieldwork.\u00a0 Instead, he has directed his interest toward the fledgling field of research known as planetary geology.<\/p>\n

In 2008, Yin began applying his Earth geology expertise to landscapes he observed on other planets. \u201cHaving limited data to create a tectonic story in large areas of Asia gave me the know-how to explore planet-related problems,\u201d Yin said. \u201cThe process turns out to be quite similar.\u201d In his early days of Tibetan research Yin used satellite images to estimate locations of faults before going into the field; similarly, he uses satellite images to understand planetary geology from afar.\u00a0 Images today, however, provide more clues about the geology.\u00a0 \u201cHigh-resolution images have revolutionized mapping and geologic interpretation,\u201d said Yin. \u201cWe still can\u2019t determine composition, but we can say for certain how much and in what manner a feature is offset from its original position.\u201d<\/p>\n

To explain the features he observes on Mars, Yin has developed a theory that invokes a one-plate tectonic system.\u00a0 Unlike Earth, which has 15 major tectonic plates that move continuously and are responsible for forming mountains and oceans, Mars has only one plate that moves very slowly.\u00a0 Moving at a pace 1000 times slower than those on Earth, Mars\u2019 tectonic plate produces\u00a0 plate-boundary features like volcanoes and faults that materialize in a relatively small area and grow very large.\u00a0 Maps of Mars show that almost all its prominent features are confined to just one-third of the planet.\u00a0 Among these features are the colossal Tharsis Montes, three volcanoes so large they could fit 32 of Earth\u2019s three-mile-high Andean volcanoes into the volume they occupy.<\/p>\n

Although Mars\u2019 features are grander, they share many characteristics with Earth\u2019s terrain.\u00a0 This observation led Yin to contemplate the underlying processes that create the two planets\u2019 surfaces.\u00a0 For not only Mars, but for many planetary bodies, the differences in these processes may be the result of their individual \u201cevolutionary paths,\u201d said Yin.<\/p>\n

Piecing together the story of how a planet\u2019s geology has changed over time requires Yin to use all the resources at his disposal. \u201cThe problem with planetary geology is that you see a static image,\u201d he said, \u201cthe history is harder to show.\u201d\u00a0 One way of revealing the history is by observing it.\u00a0 In Yin\u2019s laboratory, he and his graduate students design sandbox experiments to reveal how faults, mountains, and valleys develop.\u00a0 While these experiments are intended to mimic natural conditions, they do not represent the exact history of any process, and act more as a guide to help determine whether their basic assumptions are correct.<\/p>\n

From these experiments, Yin has determined that the histories of Mars and Earth are quite similar, differing only in their rates of evolution.\u00a0 \u201cMars is smaller and has less heat, so the driving engine is not as powerful as Earth\u2019s,\u201d said Yin.\u00a0 Although Mars and Earth appear to be quite similar, other planetary bodies may have very dissimilar evolutionary paths.<\/p>\n

Yin\u2019s newest foray into planetary science involves Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn.\u00a0 He interprets the famous \u201cTiger Stripes\u201d that periodically eject water vapor from its south pole as a product of the movement of the moon\u2019s icy shell, and prefers to call them \u201cHorsetails,\u201d after a Himalayan feature they so closely mimic.\u00a0 While Yin can decipher portions of Enceladus\u2019 history from its surface features, it remains unclear whether there is a global or localized ocean beneath the icy surface. \u201cThis is an actively debated subject,\u201d said Yin, \u201cbut for now I can only tell the story of what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the otherworldly geology he\u2019s studied thus far, Yin has learned that \u201cthe planetary world is something that defies common sense in many respects.\u00a0 We have an idea of how a planet should develop and what it should look like, and we find exception after exception after exception.\u201d Yin hopes that his continued interdisciplinary approach to planetary geology will result in observing \u201coverlapping parts of commonality\u201d between planets that could reveal more about planetary evolution as a whole.<\/p>\n

Watch a video profile of An Yin here<\/a>.\u00a0 Learn more about his research here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few people can claim that their children learned to walk in the forests of Yosemite National Park.\u00a0 Professor An Yin, who has spent much of his 26 years at UCLA conducting fieldwork in Tibet, the Himalayas, and California, can.\u00a0 Having spent his graduate career investigating remote areas of Glacier National Park, Yin\u2019s mountaineering experience equipped … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Prof. Yin investigates the geology of other worlds”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":11308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[296,32],"tags":[350,288,351,352],"class_list":["post-6512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-news","tag-an-yin","tag-mars","tag-planetary-geology","tag-tharsis-montes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6512"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11307,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6512\/revisions\/11307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}