Discovery that Earth’s next-door neighbour is volcanically active is important to understanding what the conditions are for making a planet habitable
A fresh analysis of radar images obtained more than three decades ago has yielded new evidence indicating Venus, Earth’s planetary next-door neighbour, is currently volcanically active – a dynamic world with eruptions and lava flows.
“What we definitively can demonstrate is that a volcanic vent got larger and looks to have gone from conical and hundreds of meters deep in its interior to a flat, nearly filled interior,” said Robert Herrick, a University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute research professor and lead author of the study published in the journal Science.
“Although it is possible the vent collapse was not associated with active volcanism, on Earth this large a collapse is usually associated with some sort of magmatic movement, and hence we think it likely to be the case here,” said study co-author Scott Hensley, a senior research scientist specializing in radar remote sensing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
This is the latest evidence that Venus, lacking the plate tectonics that gradually reshape Earth’s surface, is not the geologically dormant world some scientists had once considered it. Another study published in 2020 identified 37 volcanic structures apparently active in the past 2 million to 3 million years.
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