Possible volcanic eruptions could turn Venus into an inferno
Massive global volcanism, which covered 80% of Venus’ surface with lava, may have been the decisive factor in turning Venus from a wet and soft world into the stifling, sulphurous, hellish planet it is today.
Surface temperature at Venus it’s a scorching 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead, and beneath dense clouds of carbon dioxide mixed with corrosive sulfuric acid is a staggering 90 atmospheres of pressure. Often condemned as Earth“evil twin” Venus is a victim of escape greenhouse effectno doubt enhanced by the fact that Venus is approximately 25 million miles (40 million kilometers) closer to withUniv than the Earth and therefore receives more heat.
However, there is the evidence is mounting that Venus was not always like this and may once have been a temperate world, something like Earth – perhaps more recently, in geological terms, than expected.
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Michael Way of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland led much of the research developing this new vision of Venus. In his latest paper, he and his team argue that volcanism on Venus may have ultimately been what pushed the planet over the edge, sending huge amounts of carbon dioxide – a powerful greenhouse gas as we know it – into Atmosphere of Venus.
In the 1990s, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft made a radar map of the surface of Venus, which is otherwise obscured by the planet’s thick atmosphere, and found that much of the surface is covered by volcanic basaltic rocks. Such “large igneous provinces” are the result of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years massive volcanism that happened at some point in the past billion years.
In particular, some of these events, which took place over a million years, and each covered hundreds of thousands of square miles or kilometers in lava, could have injected Venus’ atmosphere with so much carbon dioxide that the climate would have been unable to cope. Any oceans would boil off, adding moisture to the atmosphere, and since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, accelerating the greenhouse effect. In time, water would disappear into space, but carbon dioxide and inhospitable worlds would remain.
“Although we’re not yet sure how often the events that created these fields occurred, we should be able to narrow it down by studying Earth’s own history,” Wei said in statement.
The frequency with which massive volcanic events that produced large magmatic provinces have occurred on Earth suggests that it is likely that several such events could have occurred on Venus within a million years. These incidents could have permanently damaged Venus.
Earth itself has had a few close calls. So-called “supervolcanoes” have been associated with numerous mass extinction events on Earth over the past half billion years. For example, the Late Devonian mass extinction 370 million years ago is attributed by some to supervolcanism in what is now Russia and Siberia, as well as a separate supervolcanic eruption in Australia. The Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction is largely attributed to the formation of Earth’s largest of the major igneous provinces, the Central Atlantic Igneous Province, 200 million years ago. Even the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago could have been caused double whammy asteroid impact and supervolcanism in the Deccan Traps, a large igneous province in India.
For unknown reasons, similar volcanic events were much more common on Venus and caused a greenhouse effect that changed the planet. Meanwhile, on Earth, the carbon-silicate cycle, which acts as the planet’s natural thermostat, exchanging carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases between the mantle and atmosphere over millions of years, has been able to prevent Earth from following the same path as Venus.
Two upcoming NASA missions will attempt to answer some of these questions. DAVINCI, the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Visualization mission will launch later this decade, followed by VERITAS, the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy mission in the early 2030s. European Space Agency EnVision’s mission is also slated to launch sometime in the 2030s, while China has proposed a possible mission called VOICEVenus Volcano Imaging and Climate Explorer, which, if launched, will reach Venus in 2027 to study the planet’s atmosphere and geology.
“The primary goal of DAVINCI is to narrow down the history of water on Venus and learn when it might have disappeared, providing a deeper understanding of how Venus’s climate has changed over time,” Way said.
The findings were published in Planetary Science Journal earlier this year.
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