Volcanoes on Venus. Radiating our
from the Venusian volcano Ozza Mons (red, center) are thousands of
miles of rift zones (purple). Data from the Venus Express spacecraft
suggests there are active lava flows in hotspots along the rifts.
Credit: Ivanov/Head/Dickson/Brown University
An international team of scientists has
found some of the best evidence yet that Venus, Earth's nearest
neighbor, is volcanically active.
In combing through data from the European Space Agency's Venus
Express mission, the scientists found transient spikes in temperature at
several spots on the planet's surface. The hotspots, which were found
to flash and fade over the course of just a few days, appear to be
generated by active flows of lava on the surface.
"We were able to show strong evidence that Venus is volcanically, and
thus internally, active today," said James W. Head, a geologist at
Brown University and co-author of a paper describing the new research.
"This is a major finding that helps us understand the evolution of
planets like our own."
The research is published online in Geophysical Research Letters.
The hotspots turned up in thermal imaging taken by the Venus Express
spacecraft's Venus Monitoring Camera. The data showed spikes in
temperature of several hundred degrees Fahrenheit in spots ranging in
size from 1 square kilometer to over 200 kilometers.
The spots were clustered in a large rift zone called Ganiki Chasma.
Rift zones are formed by stretching of the crust by internal forces and
hot magma that rises toward the surface. Head and Russian colleague
Mikhail Ivanov had previously mapped the region as part of a global
geologic map of Venus generated from the Soviet Venera missions in the
1980s and U.S. Magellan mission in the 1990s. The mapping work had shown
that Ganiki Chasma was quite young, geologically speaking, but just how
young wasn't clear until now.
"We knew that Ganiki Chasma was the result of volcanism that had
occurred fairly recently in geological terms, but we didn't know if it
formed yesterday or was a billion years old," Head said. "The active
anomalies detected by Venus Express fall exactly where we had mapped
these relatively young deposits and suggest ongoing activity."
The latest finding is consistent with other data from Venus Express
that have hinted at very recent volcanic activity. In 2010, infrared
imaging from several volcanoes seemed to indicate lava flows from
thousands to a few million years old. A few years later, scientists
reported transient spikes in sulfur dioxide in Venus' upper atmosphere,
another potential signal of active volcanism.
The observation of hotspots by Venus Express, combined with the
geologic mapping from Venera and Magellan, make a strong case for a
volcanically active Venus, Head says.
"This discovery fits nicely with the emerging picture of very recent
activity in Venus' geologic history," he said. "These remarkable
findings were the result of collaborations spanning many years and many
political borders. They underscore the importance of international
collaboration in exploring our solar system and understanding how it
evolves."
The work was led by Eugene Shalygin and Wojciech Markiewicz of the
Max Planck Institute. Additional co-authors were Alexander Basilevski
(Russia's Vernadsky Institute and Brown University), Dima Titov
(European Space Agency) and N.I. Ignatiev (Russia's Space Research
Institute).
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from
materials provided by
Brown University.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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