What evidence exists for active volcanoes on Venus?

Venus: Still Alive and Kicking? Evidence Points to Active Volcanoes

For ages, Venus got a bad rap – everyone thought it was geologically dead as a doornail. But hold on, because it turns out our scorching sister planet might be a whole lot livelier than we ever imagined! We’re talking potentially as volcanically active as Earth, which is a pretty big deal. This isn’t just some wild theory; a growing pile of evidence, dug up from old NASA data and brand-new analyses, is totally changing how we see this hellish world.

So, where’s this evidence coming from? Well, a lot of it goes back to the Magellan mission. Back in the early 90s, this NASA spacecraft spent a couple of years orbiting Venus, mapping almost the entire surface with radar. And these radar images? They’re gold. They can see right through Venus’s thick, cloudy atmosphere, giving us the best views we’ve ever had.

Now, fast forward to 2023. Scientists announced something huge: the first actual geological proof of recent volcanic activity. Remember those Magellan images? By comparing images taken just eight months apart back in ’91, they spotted a volcanic vent near Maat Mons, a massive shield volcano, that had gone through some serious changes. What was once a neat, small circle had doubled in size, gotten all wonky-shaped, and looked like it was filled with a lava lake. I mean, come on, that’s pretty much a smoking gun for an eruption, right?

But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, another look at the Magellan data turned up even more clues: signs of fresh lava flows on the slopes of Sif Mons (another big volcano) and in a place called Niobe Planitia, which is basically a volcanic hotspot. These flows look like long, winding rivers in the radar images, snaking their way down the terrain. They’re probably pretty young, or maybe just super rough, which is why the radar picks them up so well. NASA even said the Niobe Planitia eruption could have filled over 50,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools with lava! That sounds like a lot, but it’s still less than the 2022 Mauna Loa eruption in Hawaii.

Why does all this matter? Well, it could help us understand why Venus and Earth, which started out so similar, ended up so different. They’re almost the same size, and probably had similar amounts of water way back when. But somewhere along the line, Venus turned into a pressure cooker, while Earth became the cozy, habitable place we call home. By studying Venus’s volcanoes, which are driven by its internal heat, we might figure out why these two planets took such wildly different paths.

It also hints that Venus might be losing heat in a completely different way than Earth. We’ve got plate tectonics and volcanoes that help vent heat. Venus doesn’t have plate tectonics, so maybe it’s relying on volcanoes to do most of the work.

All this excitement has led to a renewed push to explore Venus. NASA’s got a mission in the works called VERITAS, which should be launching within the next decade. VERITAS will take a closer look at Venus’s surface and peek inside the planet to understand its volcanoes and history.

Sure, we still need to learn a lot more before we can say for sure just how active Venus really is. But these recent discoveries have definitely turned Venus from a “dead planet” into a dynamic, volcanic world. And who knows? Maybe understanding Venus will help us better understand our own planet, too.