Extensive volcanic eruptions may have turned Venus from heaven to hell
The massive global volcanism that covered 80% of the surface of Venus in lava was probably the decisive factor that transformed Venus from a wet, temperate world into the stifling, sulfurous, infernal planet it is today.
Surface temperature run Venus It’s a temperature of 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead, and there’s a crushing pressure of 90 atmospheres beneath thick clouds of carbon dioxide covered in corrosive sulfuric acid. Often decried a land“Evil twin” Venus is a runaway victim Global WarmingVenus undoubtedly swelled close to it by about 25 million miles (40 million km).And the from the Earth and thus receive more heat.
However, there is Mounting evidence That Venus hasn’t always been this way, and might one day have been a temperate world somewhat similar to Earth—perhaps more recently, geologically speaking, than might have been expected.
Related: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe takes a stunning picture of Venus during its close flyby
Michael Way, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, led much of the research developing this new view of Venus. In their latest paper, he and his team argued that Venus’s volcanic activity could ultimately be what pushed the planet over the brink by sending massive amounts of carbon dioxide — we know, a potent greenhouse gas — spiraling into the atmosphere. Venus atmosphere.
In the 1990s, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft mapped the surface of Venus, which is obscured by the planet’s thick atmosphere, and found that much of the surface was covered with volcanic basalt rocks. These “great fire provinces” are the result of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years Supervolcanoes that occurred at some point in the last billion years.
In particular, several of these events coming in the space of a million years, perhaps, and each covering hundreds of thousands of square miles or kilometers in lava, would have given Venus’s atmosphere so much carbon dioxide that the climate was not able to. to match. Any oceans would boil away, adding moisture to the atmosphere, and because water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, accelerating global warming. Over time, the water would have been lost to space, but the carbon dioxide, and harsh world, remained.
Wai said in a message statement.
The frequency with which massive volcanic events forming large igneous provinces have occurred on Earth indicates that many such events are likely to occur on Venus within a million years. These accidents could have affected Venus forever.
The Earth itself has some close calls. So-called “supervolcanoes” have been associated with many mass extinction events on Earth over the past half-billion years. For example, some attribute the late Devonian mass extinction 370 million years ago to supervolcanoes in what is now Russia and Siberia, as well as to a separate large volcanic eruption in Australia. The Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction is widely blamed for the formation of the largest igneous province on Earth, the Magmatic Mid-Atlantic Province, 200 million years ago. Even the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have caused The double whammy An asteroid strike and supervolcanoes in the Deccan Traps, a large fiery province in India.
For unknown reasons, similar volcanic events on Venus were more widespread and instigated a runaway greenhouse effect that transformed the planet. Meanwhile on Earth, the carbon-silicate cycle that acts as the planet’s natural heat regulator, exchanging carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases between the mantle and atmosphere over millions of years, was able to prevent Earth from following the same trajectory as Venus.
Future NASA missions will seek to answer some of these questions. Da VinciThe Venus Deep Atmosphere Exploration Mission for Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging will launch later this decade, to be followed by the Veritas, Venus Emission, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy mission in the early 2000s. European Space Agency EnVision mission It also aims to launch sometime in the 2030s, while China has proposed a possible mission called human voicea Venus Imaging and Climate Explorer, which, if launched, will reach Venus in 2027 to study the planet’s atmosphere and geology.
“DAVINCI’s primary goal is to narrow down the history of water on Venus and when it may have disappeared, providing more information about how the climate of Venus has changed over time,” Way said.
The results are published in Planetary Science Journal earlier this year.
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