Tag: Venus

Tectonics on Venus

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The surface of Venus is not easily observed because of the almost opaque nature of its atmosphere. The planet is veiled by a mixture of CO2 (96.5%) and nitrogen (3.5%), with a little sulfur dioxide and noble gases. The atmosphere’s mass is almost 100 times that of the Earth’s, and has a density about 6.5% that of liquid water at the surface. The opacity stems from a turbulent upper layer of mainly sulfuric acid. Venus is the victim of runaway greenhouse conditions. Despite that, radar can penetrate the atmosphere to reveal details of its surface morphology – roughness and elevation – at a spatial resolution of 150 m. Although coarser than that available from radar remote sensing of the Earth from orbit, the Magellan data are still geologically revealing.

Earlier interpretation of Venus radar images revealed the surface to be far simpler than that of the Earth, Mars and all other rocky bodies in the Solar System. Yet it has more volcanoes than does the Earth or Mars. However, despite being subject to very little erosion – Venus is a dry world – only around 1000 impact craters have been found: far short of the number seen on Mars or the Moon. This deficiency of evidence for bombardment suggests that Venus was ‘repaved’ by vast volcanic outpourings in the geologically recent past, estimated to have occurred 300 to 600 Ma ago. This early work concluded that plate tectonics was absent; indeed that for half a billion years the lithosphere on Venus had been barely deformed. It has been suggested that Venus has been involved in megacycles of sudden, planet-wide magmatic activity separated by long periods of quiescence. This could be attributed to the lack of plate tectonics, which is the principal means that Earth continuously rids itself of heat produced at depth by decay of radioactive isotopes in the mantle. Venus has been suggested to build up internal temperatures until they reach a threshold that launches widespread partial melting of its mantle. Planet-wide eruption of magma then reduces internal temperatures.

Polygonal blocks or ‘campuses’ on the lowland surface of Venus. Note the zones of ridges that roughly parallel ‘campus’ margins. Credit: Paul K. Byrne, North Carolina State University and Sean C. Solomon, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

It comes as a surprise that 26 years after Magellan plunged into the Venusian atmosphere new interpretation of its radar images suggests a completely different scenario (it may be that academic attention generally switched to research on Mars because of all the missions to the ‘Red Planet’ since Magellan disappeared). It is based on features of the surface of Venus so large that their having been missed until now may be a planetary-scale example of ‘not seeing the woods for the trees’! Geoscientists from the US, Turkey, the UK and Greece have mapped out features ranging from 100 to 1000 km across that cover the lowland parts of Venus (Byrne, P.K. et al. 2021. A globally fragmented and mobile lithosphere on Venus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, v. 118, article e2025919118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2025919118). They resemble 1950s ‘crazy paving’ or floes in Arctic pack ice, but on a much larger scale. Extending the ice floe analogy, the polygonal blocks are separated by what resemble pressure ridges that roughly parallel the block margins. Paul Byrne of North Carolina State University, USA, and co-workers also found evidence that the large blocks of lithosphere had rotated and moved laterally relative to one another: they had ‘jostled’. Moreover, some of the movement has disturbed the youngest materials on the surface.

To distinguish what seem to be characteristic of Venus’s tectonics from Earthly tectonic plates, the team hit on the name ‘campus’, meaning ‘field’ in Latin. Rather than having remained a single spherical skin of lithosphere, the surface of at least part of Venus has broken into a series of ‘campuses’. It does display tectonics, but not as we know it on planet Earth. This could be ascribed to an outcome of stress transfer from deep convective motion in the Venerean mantle. Being in the virtually non-magmatic phase of Venus’s thermal cycling, there is neither formation of new lithosphere nor subduction of old, cold plates that characterise terrestrial plate tectonics. ‘Campus’ tectonics seems likely to be another form of planetary energy and matter redistribution, and Byrne et al. have likened it to how the Earth may have functioned during the ‘missing’ 600 Ma of the Hadean Eon on Earth. But perhaps not …

The runaway greenhouse has resulted in surface temperatures on Venus being 450°C higher than on Earth: enough to melt lead. It is not just solar heat that is trapped by the atmosphere, but that from the Venerean interior. This must result in a very different geotherm (the way temperature varies with depth in a planet) from that characterising the Earth. The temperature of the beginning of mantle melting – about 1200°C – must be much shallower on Venus. On Earth that is at depths between 50 and 100 km below active plate margins and within-plate hotspots, and is not reached at all for most of the Earth that lies beneath the tectonic plates. If the mantle of Venus contained a similar complement of heat-producing isotopes to that of Earth wouldn’t we expect continual volcanism on Venus rather than the odd dribble that has been observed by Magellan? Or does the jostling of ‘campuses’ absorb the thermal energy and help direct it slowly to space by radiation through the dense, greenhouse atmosphere. Here’s another poser: If the Earth and Venus are geochemically similar and Hadean Earth went through such a phase of ‘campus tectonics’ – perhaps our world had a CO2-rich atmosphere too – what changed to allow plate tectonics here to replace that system of thermal balance? And, why hasn’t that happened on Venus? Perhaps some light will be thrown on these enigmas once a series of new missions to Venus are launched between now and the 2030s, by NASA and the European Space Agency.

Active volcanic processes on Venus

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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.

Volcanic ‘pancake’ domes on the surface of Venus, about 65 km wide and 1 km high, imaged by orbital radar carried by NASA’s Magellan Mission.

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.

Venus VNIR
Colour-coded image of night-time thermal emissivity over Venus’s southern hemisphere as sensed by VIRTIS on Venus Express (Credit: M. Gilmore 2017, Space Sci. Rev. DOI 10.1007/s11214-017-0370-8; Fig. 3)

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.