The tail-end accretion hypothesis of planet formation posits that the early Moon underwent heavy impacts. Viscous relaxation erased lunar impact basins that formed shortly after the solidification of the lunar magma ocean, explaining the low number of basins currently present on the Moon.

Ancient lunar basins that formed within about 100 million years after the lunar magma ocean solidified have fully relaxed, owing to the high temperature of the lower crust, and thus escaped detection. This finding explains the discrepancy between the number of basins detected on the Moon (~40) and the number predicted (~300) by an accretion scenario of planet formation.

Examination of the sulfur and copper contents of global cratonic peridotites combined with new high-pressure experiments shows that the migration of carbonated melts towards cratonic margins explains the co-location of magmatic metal deposits with carbonatites.

The tail-end accretion hypothesis of planet formation posits that the early Moon underwent heavy impacts. Viscous relaxation erased lunar impact basins that formed shortly after the solidification of the lunar magma ocean, explaining the low number of basins currently present on the Moon.

Ceres’s surface is ice-rich and warm, so we expect craters to viscously flow. Yet most of Ceres’s craters are not shallow. A new model that includes a stronger, progressively dirtier icy crust, frozen from an ancient ocean, may reconcile this discrepancy.

The processes that control the deformation and eventual destruction of Earth’s oldest continental crust are unclear. Mantle flow models suggest subduction played a role in the deformation of the North China Craton.

This study investigates the history of graphitic carbon in two ancient North American mountain belts related to Nuna supercontinent assembly. Using rhenium–osmium and uranium–lead dating, the research reveals that biogenic graphite was hydrothermally remobilized in shear zones during late orogenesis, indicating periodic carbon cycling over 200 million years.

Computational simulations of Venus’s geodynamics show the formation of large tessera plateaus. Matching of the models with spacecraft orbiter data constrains the mechanism that may have formed the topography of Ishtar Terra and other plateaus on Venus, suggesting that these features might have formed by a mechanism similar to that of the early continents on Earth.

High-resolution numerical simulations show that subduction of the Indian plate peeled off the mantle lithosphere from the Tibetan Plateau. This process successfully explains first-order observations of the stepwise growth of the plateau, the migration of magmatism in the region and its seismic properties.