Volcanoes on Venus Might Still Be Smoking

Venus is our toxic twin. Its chemical makeup, size and density are similar to our world’s, although its hellish temperatures can melt lead, and its atmosphere is rife with sulfuric acid.

But it may be even more Earthlike than we knew. A paper published last week in Science Advances demonstrates that Venus might still harbor active volcanoes. If confirmed, the finding could help astronomers and planetary scientists as they search for life on other worlds.

Scientists have long debated whether Venus might be volcanically active. In the early 1990s, cloud-penetrating radar on the Magellan orbiter revealed a surface studded with volcano-like mountains. But no one knew whether these features remained active. Then in 2010, data from Europe’s Venus Express spacecraft revealed several hot spots that suggested lava had flowed as recently as 250,000 years ago. And in 2012, the orbiter observed spikes in sulfur dioxide — a gas that smells like a struck match and is commonly produced on Earth by active volcanoes — within the Venusian atmosphere.

The evidence was tantalizing, but incomplete. “The data that are currently available for Venus cannot unequivocally provide the smoking gun,” said Tracy Gregg, a geologist at the University at Buffalo.

So Justin Filiberto, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, decided to take another look. His team experimented with crystals of olivine, a green mineral commonly found in volcanic rock. Specifically, they wanted to see how the mineral might change once it erupted into the hot, Venusian atmosphere.