Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2009
An extended version of the ergodic closing lemma of Mañé is proved. As an application, we show that, C1 densely in the complement of the closure of Morse–Smale diffeomorphisms and those with a homoclinic tangency, there exists a weakly hyperbolic structure (dominated splittings with average hyperbolicity at almost every point on hyperbolic parts, and one-dimensional center direction when zero Lyapunov exponents are involved) over the supports of all non-atomic ergodic measures. As another application, we prove an approximation theorem, which claims that approximating the Lyapunov exponents of any non-atomic ergodic measure by those of an atomic ergodic measure by a C1 small perturbation is possible.