Satellite and recent Earth-based observations of Io's surface reveal a specific spatial pattern of persisting hotspots and sudden high-intensity events. Io's major heat producing mechanism is tidal dissipation, which is thought to be non-uniformly distributed within Io's mantle and asthenosphere. The question arises to what extent Io's non-homogeneous heat production can cause long-wavelength variations in the interior and volcanic activity at the surface. We investigate dissipation patterns resulting from two different initially spherical symmetric visco-elastic rheological structures, which are consistent with geodetic observations. The spatial distributions of the time-averaged tidal heat production are computed by a finite element model. Whereas for the first rheological structure heat is produced only in the upper viscous layer (asthenosphere-heating model), the second rheological structure results in a more evenly distributed dissipation pattern (mixed-heating model) with tidal heating occurring in the deep mantle and the asthenosphere. To relate the heat production to the interior temperature and melt distribution, we use steady-state scaling laws of mantle convection and a simple melt migration model. The resulting long-wavelength thermal heterogeneities strongly depend on the initial tidal dissipation pattern, the thickness of the convective layer, the mantle viscosity, and the ratio between magmatic and convective heat transport. While for the asthenosphere-heating model a strong lateral temperature signal with up to 190 K peak-to-peak difference can remain, convection within a thick convective layer, as for the mixed-heating model, can reduce the lateral temperature variation to <1 K, if the mantle viscosity is sufficiently low. Models with a dominating magma heat transport preserve the long-wavelength pattern of tidal dissipation much better and are favoured, because they are better to explain Io's thick crust. The approach presented here can also be applied to investigate the effect of an arbitrary interior heating pattern on Io's volcanic activity pattern.

Existing approaches for simulating the true polar wander (TPW) of a viscoelastic body can be divided into three categories: (i) a linear dynamic approach which uses the linearized Liouville equation (e.g., Wu and Peltier (1984) and Mitrovica et al. (2005)); (ii) a nonlinear dynamic approach which is based on the quasi-fluid approximation (e.g., Sabadini and Peltier (1981), Ricard et al. (1993), and Cambiotti et al. (2011)); and (iii) a long-term limit approach which only considers the fluid limit of a reorientation (e.g., Matsuyama and Nimmo (2007)). Several limitations of these approaches have not been studied: the range for which the linear approach is accurate, the validity of the quasi-fluid approximation, and the dynamic solution for TPW of a tidally deformed rotating body. We establish a numerical procedure which is able to determine the large-angle reorientation of a viscoelastic celestial body that can be both centrifugally and tidally deformed. We show that the linear approach leads to significant errors for loadings near the poles or the equator. Second, we show that slow relaxation modes can have a significant effect on large-angle TPW of Earth or other planets. Finally, we show that reorientation of a tidally deformed body driven by a positive mass anomaly near the poles has a preference for rotating around the tidal axis instead of toward it. At a tidally deformed body which does not have a remnant bulge, positive mass anomalies are more likely to be found near the equator and the plane perpendicular to the tidal axis, while negative mass anomalies tend to be near the great circle that contains the tidal and rotational axes.