Characteristics and Geological Relationships of Shield Field versus Shield Plains on Venus

Introduction: The surface of Venus displays > 550 clusters of small (< 20 km basal diameter) shield volcanoes. Aubele [2] proposed the existence of 2 morphological classes of these Venusian shield clusters: shield fields (Fig. 1) and shield plains (Fig. 2). Shield fields consist of small shield volcanoes that are contained within a 10 3 – 150 2 km 2 region, whereas shield plains are shield volcanoes distributed over 10 3