Massive global volcanic activity spewing lava covering 80% of the Earth’s surface may have been the key to turning Venus from heaven to hell.
Venus is now a victim of a runaway greenhouse effect, with a surface temperature of 463°C, hot enough to melt lead, but there is growing evidence that Venus was not this way in the past, but a mild world somewhat similar to Earth. In a new paper, a team led by astronomer Michael Way of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center believes that large-scale volcanic activity releases a large amount of carbon dioxide, which may be the main reason for pushing Venus to the hell planet.
In the 1990s, NASA’s Magellan Venus probe used radar to map the surface of Venus and found that most of it was covered by volcanic basalt, which may be the remnants of large-scale volcanic activity lasting tens of thousands of years in the past billions of years, and even Some events may have occurred only in the last million years. Each volcanic activity covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of lava on the surface, bringing in large amounts of carbon dioxide that natural systems cannot regulate. Over time, water will disappear, but Carbon dioxide is still present.
The earth has also experienced at least 5 mass extinction events in the past, each of which wiped out more than 50% of life. Most of these events were also caused by super-volcanic eruptions that produced large-scale igneous rocks. For example, the mass extinction in the late Devonian period 370 million years ago may be related to It is related to the volcanic activities in Russia and Siberia, but the earth does not form an out-of-control greenhouse effect like Venus. The exchange of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere saves the earth from the fate of global warming.
While we may never fully understand all the factors that make Earth and Venus so different, volcanic activity clearly plays a key role, and scientists should be able to understand more about the divergence of Venus as the VERITAS, DAVINCI, and EnVision Venus probes go their separate ways. path.
(First image source: NASA)
