Surprise! Volcanoes on Venus are Active
Recent activity just discovered on this already inhospitable world
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Venus has been characterized as an utter hell, with toxic air, a surface temperature around 900° Fahrenheit (482 Celsius), and air pressure 75 times what you’re used to— described as being “like having a small car sitting on your thumbnail.”
If that weren’t enough, there are volcanoes, too.
Using old data from NASA’s Magellan mission, researchers just spotted signs that two volcanoes erupted in 1990, altering the landscape noticeably during an interval when the satellite mapped the surface of Venus, from 1990 to 1992. That adds to an earlier discovery that Venus’ volcano Maat Mons was volcanically active.
While 1990 seems like a long time ago in human terms, that’s like a few minutes ago in Venus’ roughly 4.5 billion years of existence and thus.
“Our results show that Venus may be far more volcanically active than previously thought,” study leader Davide Sulcanese of d’Annunzio University in Pescara, Italy, said in a statement. “By analyzing the lava flows we observed in two locations on the planet, we have discovered that the volcanic activity on Venus could be comparable to that on Earth.”
The findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Venus isn’t the only orb in our solar system shaped by volcanoes. Though dormant, Olympus Mons, on Mars, is the largest known volcano in the entire solar system. Mars was long thought to be volcanically inactive. But last year, researchers found evidence for numerous eruptions on the Red Planet that took place as recently as a million years ago—again, pretty recent in terms of the time scale of planetary development, and other research has suggested volcanic activity may still be occurring.
The most volcanically active body in the solar system is Io, the giant “pizza moon” of Jupiter. This colorful moon is pockmarked with hundreds of active volcanoes, some that spew lava dozens of miles above the surface.
Oh, and Earth has volcanoes, too.
Even our own moon was shaped by volcanic activity. Which brings us to your Aha moment of the day: The moon has earthquakes, too. Oops—moonquakes, I mean, and they’re still happening today.
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Cheers,
Rob