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<p>Slope lineae are enigmatic, bright, and seemingly young features on Mercury. Past investigations hypothesized that lineae occurrence might be tied to volatile loss, analogous to hollows, but no systematic analysis has been conducted. Here, we use a deep learning-driven approach to map 402 slope lineae across the planet. Lineae seem to feature blue spectral slopes and tend to originate from hollows or bright, ‘hollow-like’ features located on the equator-facing walls of young impact craters that penetrated volcanic smooth plains, implying that lineae activity could be driven by heat loss, insolation, and the devolatilization of subsurface phases like sulfur. We do not observe any geomorphic lineae activity between 2011 and 2015, suggesting that activity occurs on timescales longer than ~4 years or below MESSENGER’s spatial resolution. Lineae activity as a geomorphic indicator of recent or ongoing volatile loss on Mercury represents a specific hypothesis that can be scrutinized by ESA/JAXA BepiColombo.</p>

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Slope lineae as potential indicators of recent volatile loss on Mercury

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月27日

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  • V. T. Bickel,
  • G. Munaretto,
  • S. Bertoli,
  • G. Cremonese,
  • P. Cambianica,
  • N. A. Vergara Sassarini

摘要

Slope lineae are enigmatic, bright, and seemingly young features on Mercury. Past investigations hypothesized that lineae occurrence might be tied to volatile loss, analogous to hollows, but no systematic analysis has been conducted. Here, we use a deep learning-driven approach to map 402 slope lineae across the planet. Lineae seem to feature blue spectral slopes and tend to originate from hollows or bright, ‘hollow-like’ features located on the equator-facing walls of young impact craters that penetrated volcanic smooth plains, implying that lineae activity could be driven by heat loss, insolation, and the devolatilization of subsurface phases like sulfur. We do not observe any geomorphic lineae activity between 2011 and 2015, suggesting that activity occurs on timescales longer than ~4 years or below MESSENGER’s spatial resolution. Lineae activity as a geomorphic indicator of recent or ongoing volatile loss on Mercury represents a specific hypothesis that can be scrutinized by ESA/JAXA BepiColombo.