The map details the locations and sizes of all 85,000 volcanic landforms discovered on our planet’s “evil twin” so far, and scientists hope it will help the search for new active volcanoes on Earth’s scorching neighbor.
Although Venus has more volcanoes than any other planet in the solar system, it does not have plate tectonics, which leads to volcanic activity as it does on Earth.
For years, scientists believed that volcanoes on Venus had long since become extinct, but the recent discovery of an active volcano on Venus was announced earlier this year, which renewed interest among planetary scientists to search for more living volcanoes on the planet’s surface.
“This new database will enable scientists to think of nowhere else to look for evidence of recent geological activity,” Paul Byrne, professor of astronomy at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and co-author of the study, said in a statement.
The map, which was released on Thursday, March 29, is the largest catalog of volcanoes in any world, including Earth, since most of our planet’s volcanoes have yet to be found because they are hidden underwater on the ocean floor.
Since Venus is a dry world, it displays all the volcanoes on its surface, allowing scientists to discover and study most if not all of them.
Byrne’s team made the map available to the public and for other scientists to analyze. The team hopes it will provide a better understanding of how volcanoes of different sizes form, spread and evolve across the surface of Venus.
“We came up with the idea of a global catalog because no one had done it on this scale before,” Rebecca Hahn, a graduate student in Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Washington and first author of the new paper, said in the release.
Right now, the only information astronomers have about volcanic activity on Venus is from images sent back by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s.
The team behind the latest study used that 30-year-old data to piece together a comprehensive inventory of volcanoes on Venus.
The scientists classified all of the volcanoes in the database into three groups based on their sizes: small terrain with a diameter of less than 3 miles (5 kilometers), medium with sizes ranging from 3 to 62 miles (5 to 100 kilometers), and large volcanoes over 62 miles (100 km). how much).
The map revealed that many small volcanoes, previously ignored by volcano hunters, make up a large part of the map, according to the study.
The team found that large volcanoes are few in number, and gather near the equator on Venus.
They also found that volcanoes on Venus tend to be either very small or very large, with the recent map showing surprisingly few volcanic terrains of medium size.
Such medium-sized landforms are found clustered in the planet’s eastern hemisphere.
Interestingly, the team did not find any volcanoes around the planet’s south pole, and the reason for this remains a mystery.
Scientists say that these results shed more light on the processes that occur in the inner part of Venus. The number and sizes of volcanoes can be explained by the specific amounts of magma circulating beneath the planet’s surface, or by the eruption rates on Venus, according to the study.
And although the latest map reveals 50 times more volcanoes than scientists thought existed on the planet’s surface before, the team believes there are more volcanoes waiting to be discovered.
The team hopes that such volcanoes will be found by NASA’s VERITAS Venus mission, which is designed to see through the planet’s thick atmosphere and has the ability to observe centimeter-sized changes on its surface. However, NASA recently withdrew the bulk of mission funding, delaying the long-awaited first of three missions to Venus indefinitely. (Russia Today)