A Revolution in Plate Tectonics?

Couldn't the slope have been greater during eruption? Could the flows simply have been pyroclastics? How about an earth-analog (in reverse): basin and range extensional regime. Hundreds of kilometers of extension along <%1 fault planes....or the Canadian Rockies: mountain building on <%1 gradient faults.

Abstract
The surface of Venus hosts hundreds of circular to elongate features, ranging from 60 to 2600 km, and averaging somewhat over 200 km, in diameter. These enigmatic structures have been termed “coronae” and attributed to either tectonovolcanic or impact-related mechanisms. A quantitative analysis of symmetry and topography is applied to coronae and similarly sized craters to evaluate the hypothesized impact origin of these features. Based on the morphology and global distribution of coronae, as well as crater density within and near coronae, we reject the impact origin for most coronae. The high level of modification of craters within coronae supports their tectonic nature. The relatively young Beta-Atla-Themis region has a high coronal concentration, and within this region individual coronae are closely associated with the chas-mata system. Models for coronae as diapirs show evolution through a sequence of stages, starting with uplift, followed by volcanism and development of annuli, and ending with collapse. With the assumption of this model, a classification of coronae is developed based merely on their interior topography. This classification yields corona types corresponding to stages that have a systematic variation of characteristics. We find that younger coronae tend toward being larger, more eccentric, and flatter than older ones, and generally occur at higher geoid and topography levels.

Abstract
Conventional interpretations assign Venus a volcanotectonic surface, younger than 1 Ga, pocked only by 1000 small impact craters. These craters, however, are superimposed on a landscape widely saturated with thousands of older, and variably modified, small to giant circular structures, which typically are rimmed depressions with the morphology expected for impact origins. Conventional analyses assign to a fraction of the most distinct old structures origins by plumes, diapirs, and other endogenic processes, and ignore the rest. The old structures have no analogues, in their venusian consensus endogenic terms, on Earth or elsewhere in the solar system, and are here argued to be of impact origin instead. The 1000 undisputed young “pristine” craters (a misnomer, for more than half of them are substantially modified) share with many of the old structures impact-diagnostic circular rims that enclose basins and that are surrounded by radial aprons of debris-flow ejecta, but conventional analyses explain the impact-compatible morphology of the old structures as coincidental products of endogenic uplifts complicated by magmatism. A continuum of increasing degradation, burial, and superposition connects the younger and truly pristine young impact structures with the most modified of the ancient structures. Younger craters of the ancient family are superimposed on older ones in impact-definitive cookie-cutter bites and are not deflected as required by endogenic conjectures. Four of the best-preserved of the pre-“pristine” circular structures are huge, with rimcrests 800–2000 km in diameter, and if indeed of impact origin, must have formed, by analogy with lunar dating, no later than 3.8 Ga. Much of the venusian plains is seen in topography to be saturated with overlapping 100–600 km circular structures, almost all of which are disregarded in conventional accounts. Several dozen larger ancient plains basins reach 2500 km in diameter, are themselves saturated with midsize impact structures, and may date back even to 4.4 Ga. Giant viscously spread “tessera plateaus” of impact melt also reach 2500 km in diameter; the youngest are little modified and are comparable in age, as calibrated by superimposed “pristine” impact structures, to the least modified of the giant impact basins, but the oldest are greatly modified and bombarded. The broad, low “volcanoes” of Venus formed within some of the larger of the ancient rimmed structures, resemble no modern volcanic complexes on Earth, and may be products of the collapse and spread of impact-fluidized central uplifts. Venusian plains are saturated with impact structures formed as transient-ocean sediments were deposited. The variable burial of, and compaction into, old craters by plains fill is incompatible with the popular contrary inference of flood basalt plains. Early “pristine” craters were formed in water-saturated sediments, subsequent greenhouse desiccation of which produced regional cracking and wrinkling of the plains and superabundant mud volcanoes (“shields”). The minimal internal planetary mobility indicated by this analysis is compatible with geophysical evidence. The history of the surface of Venus resembles that of Mars, not Earth.

There have always been big questions, such as intra-plate mountain ranges which were obviously compressive events. The Rockies are back thrusted to beat hell, and over a thousand miles from any plate boundary during the Laramide Orogeny. What drives these things has always been a shoe waiting to drop for who could figure it out.

Laramide Crustal Shortening
Warren Hamilton, GSA Memoirs (2003)

North America rapidly overrode buoyant oceanic lithosphere during late Late Cretaceous and early Paleogene time. The southwestern United States was retarded by drag against the overridden slab and advanced slightly more slowly than did the continental interior. This resulted in crustal shortening, in a broad zone between the continental subplates, that produced the variably overthrust Laramide basement uplifts of the Rocky Mountain region. The thrust faults flatten downward into the middle crust and are reflective in seismic profiles, likely because diverse crystalline rocks have been transposed along them by ductile shear and flattening.

The increase northward and northwestward, from New Mexico to Wyoming, of crustal shortening across the Laramide belt, and the fanning pattern of northwest-broadening arcs defined by the compressive structures throughout the Rocky Mountain region, indicate that the Colorado Plateau region rotated clockwise, as though about an Euler pole in or near central New Mexico, by perhaps 4° relative to the continental interior. This rotation, combined with the subsequent clockwise relative rotation of the plateau by about 3° about an Euler pole in central Colorado as the Rio Grande rift opened in middle Tertiary time, can be seen in paleomagnetic data.

A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences aims to overthrow scientific orthodoxy in a field that I grew up around, and still sometimes follow -- plate tectonics. My sympathies are with the rebels.

You will never convince me that plate techtonics is not correct.

Also, plate techtonics explains the many Ice Ages that have occurred on the earth, including the current Ice Age that we are experiencing now.
How does this alternate theory explain Ice Ages?