The Nitrogen Glaciers and Cryovolcanic Peaks of Dwarf Planet Pluto
For nearly a century, the distant world of Pluto remained little more than a smudge of light on photographic plates. Located in the frigid reaches of the Kuiper Belt, roughly 4.7 billion miles from the Sun, this dwarf planet was long assumed to be a geologically dead relic of the early Solar System. However, following the historic flyby of the New Horizons mission in 2015, our understanding of 134340 Pluto was radically transformed. Far from being an inert ball of ice, Pluto revealed itself as a world of staggering geological complexity, possessing towering mountains of water ice, vast churning glaciers of nitrogen, and a thin, multi-layered atmosphere that casts a blue haze across its horizon. Pluto’s physical structure is a testament to the dynamic processes that can occur even at temperatures hovering around 40 Kelvin (-387 degrees Fahrenheit). With a diameter of approximately 1,476 miles, it is smaller than Earth’s Moon, yet it maintains a complex internal differentiatio...