A vent on Venus that changed shape over a period of eight months is the first direct evidence that our neighbouring planet is volcanically active
at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, presented the findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, on 15 March.
By combing through areas of Venus’s surface in which they thought volcanic activity was more likely, the pair found the vent, which is in the Maat Mons volcano system, home to the planet’s highest volcano.Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month.Between February and October 1991, the vent changed from a circular, 2-square-kilometre hole to a more shallow, irregular hole with an area almost twice as big.
While the finding validates many predictions and hypotheses about active volcanism on Venus, it tells us little about the frequency of volcanic eruptions on the planet because it is the only sample we have – but the fact that we saw it at all could tell us something. “There’s the possibility that we observed the only thing that’s happened on Venus in the last 1000 years and got incredibly lucky, but the odds are that if we saw something change over a short, eight-month period, then at least volcanic eruptions occur on Venus at a similar sort of level to the intraplate volcanism on Earth, in the every-few-months time frame,” says Herrick.
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