A while back, it was realized that Venus likely had a rather Earth-like environment for a while and then for unknown reasons, became the acidic, furnace of destruction it is today. The fact that we don’t know why is something that would keep me awake at night if there weren’t for all the other things keeping me awake at night.

Venus’ atmosphere has a weather pattern called super-rotation that causes cloud patterns to move so fast east-to-west that nighttime infrared imaging, something we do on the regular here at Earth, couldn’t be done without implementing special data reduction techniques that allowed researchers to digitally track their images with the atmospheric motion and stack images. Once that super-rotation was accounted for in image analysis, infrared data of the nighttime side of Venus showed additional massive winds. This data came from Japan’s Akatsuki orbiter, and team member Imamura explains: We are finally able to observe the north-south winds, known as meridional circulation, at night. What’s surprising is that these run in the opposite direction to their daytime counterparts. Such a dramatic change cannot occur without significant consequences. This observation could help us build more accurate models of the Venusian weather system which will hopefully resolve some long-standing, unanswered questions about Venusian weather and probably Earth weather too.

I’m really hoping that in understanding Earth better, we don’t discover that super-rotation is in our future. There are some things we just don’t need to experience for ourselves.

More Information

JAXA press release

The University of Tokyo press release

“The nightside cloud-top circulation of the atmosphere of Venus,” Kiichi Fukuya et al., 2021 July 21, Nature