Earth’s nearest neighbour, apart from the Moon, is the planet Venus. As regards size and estimated density it could be Earth’s twin. It is a rocky planet, probably with a crust and mantle made of magnesium- and iron-rich silicates, and its bulk density suggests a substantial metallic core. There the resemblance ends. The whole planet is shrouded in highly reflective cloud (possibly of CO₂ ‘snow’) at the top of an atmosphere almost a hundred times more massive than ours. It consists of 96% CO₂ with 3% nitrogen, the rest being mainly sulfuric acid: the ultimate greenhouse world, and a very corrosive one. Only the four Soviet Venera missions have landed on Venus to provide close-up images of its surface. They functioned only for a couple of hours, after having measured a surface temperature around 500°C – high enough to melt lead. One Venera instrument, an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer – did crudely analyse some surface rock, showing it to be of basaltic composition. The atmosphere is not completely opaque, being transparent to microwave radiation. So both its surface textures and elevation variation have been imaged several times using orbital radar. Unlike the Earth, whose dual-peaked distribution of elevation – high continents and low ocean floors thanks to plate tectonics – Venus has just one and is significantly flatter. No tectonics operate there. There are far fewer impact craters on Venus than on Mars and the Moon, and most are small. This suggests that the present surface of Venus is far younger than are theirs; no more than 500 Ma compared to 3 to 4 billion years.

Somehow, Venus has been ‘repaved’, most likely by vast volcanic outpourings akin to the Earth’s flood basalt events, but on a global scale. Radar reveals some 1600 circular features that are undoubtedly volcanic in origin and younger than most of the craters. They resemble huge pancakes and are thought to be shield volcanoes similar to those seen on the Ethiopian Plateau but up to 100 times larges. Despite the high surface temperature and a caustic atmosphere, chemical weathering on Venus is likely to be much slower than on Earth because of the dryness of its atmosphere. Also, unlike the hydration reactions that produce terrestrial weathering, on Venus oxidizing processes probably produce iron oxides, sulfides, some anhydrous sulfates and secondary silicates. These would change the reflective properties of originally fresh igneous rocks, a little like the desert varnish that pervades rocky surfaces in arid areas on Earth. A group of US scientists have devised experiments to reproduce the likely conditions at the surface of Venus to see how long it takes for one mineral in basalt to become ‘tarnished’ in this way (Filberto, J. et al. 2020. Present-day volcanism on Venus as evidenced from weathering rates of olivine. Science Advances, v. 6, article eaax7445; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax7445). One might wonder why, seeing as the planet’s atmosphere hides the surface in the visible and short-wavelength infrared part of the spectrum, which underpins most geological remote sensing of other planetary bodies, such as Mars. In fact, that is not strictly true. Carbon dioxide lets radiation pass through in three narrow spectral ‘windows’ (centred on 1.01, 1.10, and 1.18 μm) in which fresh olivine emits more radiation when it is heated than does weathered olivine. So detecting and measuring radiation detected in these ‘windows’ should discriminate between fresh olivine and that which has been weathered Venus-style. Indeed it may help determine the degree of weathering and thus the duration of lava flow’s exposure.

The European Space Agency’s Venus Express Mission in 2006 carried a remote sensing instrument (VIRTIS) mainly aimed at the structure of Venus’s clouds and their circulation. But it also covered the three CO₂ ‘windows’, so it could detect and image the surface too. The image above shows significant areas of the surface of Venus that strongly emit short-wave infrared at night (yellow to dark red) and may be slightly weathered to fresh. Most of the surface in green to dark blue is probably heavily weathered. So the data may provide a crude map of the age of the surface. However, Filberto et al’s experiments show that olivine weathers extremely quickly under the surface conditions of Venus. In a matter of months signs of the fresh mineral disappeared. So the red areas on the image may well be lavas that have been erupted in the last few years before VIRTIS was collecting data, and perhaps active eruptions. Previous suggestions have been that some lava flows on large volcanoes are younger than 2.5 Ma and possible even younger than 0.25 Ma. Earth’s ‘evil twin’ now seems to be vastly more active, as befits a planet in which mantle-melting temperatures (~1200°C) are far closer to the surface as a result of the blanketing effect of its super-dense atmosphere.