Planetary crusts: their composition, origin and evolution / Планетарные коры: их состав, происхождение и эволюция

This work is not intended as a textbook, or as a review, but represents an enquiry into the problem of how and why solid planets produce crusts. As this seems to have happened at many different scales throughout the Solar System, we were curious to see whether some general principles might emerge from the detail. The formation of the planets themselves is the outcome of essentially random processes, constrained mainly by the history of the inner nebula and by the cosmochemical abundances of the chemical elements. But perhaps the production of crusts might be a simpler or more uniform process, a notion supported by the frequent appearance of basaltic lavas of assorted types on the surfaces of rocky bodies. <...>