Venus is famous for its "pancake domes" — steep-sided volcanoes that rise from the planet's surface like circular welts. In a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, a research team that included School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences postdoctoral fellow Madison Borrelli suggested that these unusual dome-shaped structures are at least partly sculpted by the planet's upper crust, which seems more flexible in certain regions.

To determine how a bendy crust could affect the formation of a pancake dome, Borrelli and her colleagues at universities in France and the U.S. focused on the only dome for which they had high resolution data: the Narina Tholus, an 88.5-mile-wide (55 kilometers) dome located on the circumference of the Aramaiti Corona, one of the many giant oval structures that pockmark Venus' surface.

Borrelli hopes that upcoming missions to Venus — like NASA's VERITAS program — will provide higher resolution topography of the planet's surface, allowing the researchers to test their model with more data.

Similar stories appeared at Daily Galaxy, Extreme Tech, and Newsbytes.