Massive global volcanism, covering 80% of Venus’s surface with lava, may have been the decisive factor in transforming Venus from a wet and soft world to the suffocating, sulphurous, hellish planet it is today.

Surface temperature Venus At 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 degrees Celsius), there is an overwhelming pressure of 90 atmospheres under dense clouds of carbon dioxide mixed with corrosive sulfuric acid, hot enough to melt lead. Venus, often called the “evil twin” The world has fallen victim to the greenhouse effectNo doubt made stronger by the fact that Venus is about 25 million miles (40 million kilometers) closer to the Sun, not including The soil and therefore receives more heat.

With all this, there is everything more evidence thatVenus hasn’t always been like this, and it may have once been a temperate world somewhat similar to Earth – perhaps more recently than expected, geologically speaking.

Michael Way of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland led much of the research that developed this new vision of Venus. In a recent paper, he and his team argue that Venus volcanism may be responsible for pushing the planet to the brink and releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas as we know it, to Earth. atmosphere of venus.

In the 1990s, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft took a radar map of the surface of Venus, which is normally covered by the planet’s dense atmosphere, and found that most of the surface is covered with volcanic basaltic rocks. Such “big bang zones” are the result of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. mass volcanismoccurring at some point in the last billion years.

In particular, some of these events, occurring in perhaps a million years and each covering hundreds of thousands of square miles or kilometers of lava, may have donated more carbon dioxide to the Venusian atmosphere than the climate could handle. IT. Any ocean evaporates, adding moisture to the atmosphere, and water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, accelerating the greenhouse effect. Over time, water would disappear into space, but carbon dioxide and an uninhabitable world would remain.

“While we are not yet sure how often the events that make up these areas occur, we can narrow this down by studying Earth’s own history,” Wei said. Declaration