It is one of those blistering hot days for both Pamela and me when you really wish it was safe and affordable to just go to the movie theatre and watch movies and eat popcorn all day long. Since it is neither safe nor affordable, we’re instead going to remind you things could be much much worse and talk about Venus for a bit. 

This nearby world could have a climate not too different from ours if its atmosphere was a bit different, but due to something rather horrible that happened at some point in the past, Venus transformed from a water world to a death world where temperatures hang out around 900˚F or 475˚C. 

One possible idea for the cataclysm is a massive round of volcanic eruptions. This would explain why Venus doesn’t have a lot of craters. As with many things in science, however, more than one answer is possible, and while a single round of “all of Venus erupts at once” would work, a less dramatic round of volcanoes popping up everywhere over time would also work. And of course, both could be true at once. While we can’t easily rule out “both happened” it is possible to look at the “was there one epoch of volcanism” versus “is there ongoing volcanism”. All you have to do is find active or recently active volcanoes.

And it appears one group of researchers here at the Planetary Science Institute have found one volcano that erupted 300 million to one billion years ago. What makes this discovery particularly lucky is that it required the use of Magellan data from the 1990s, and only a small region of Venus was measured in high enough resolution by the correct combination of instruments to make this detection possible. 

The feature that was examined is called a corona, which is Latin for crown, and it is cool to think that these ancient crowns on Venus are sites that record its history. We can’t wait for more missions to make it to this too-hot world and help us image more of these structures and unravel the mysteries of Venus’ past.

More Information

PSI press release

“Evidence for a Locally Thinned Lithosphere Associated With Recent Volcanism at Aramaiti Corona, Venus,” M. B. Russell and C. L. Johnson, 2021 June 18, JGR Planets