Researchers have dug through data from a decades-old NASA mission to learn about the strange geological processes which renew Venus's surface.
Venus might be our neighbor in the solar system, but there’s a lot we still don’t know about the planet. That’s partly because of its high temperatures and atmospheric pressure which make it difficult to send probes there, and also because its thick atmosphere makes it difficult to observe from orbit. But researchers have recently dug through data from a decades-old NASA mission to learn about the strange geological processes which renew its surface.
“For so long we’ve been locked into this idea that Venus’ lithosphere is stagnant and thick, but our view is now evolving,” said lead researcher Suzanne Smrekar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement. “While Venus doesn’t have Earth-style tectonics, these regions of thin lithosphere appear to be allowing significant amounts of heat to escape, similar to areas where new tectonic plates form on Earth’s seafloor.
This can help to explain a strange feature of Venus: Its surface looks young, as it lacks the many old impact craters you would expect to see on a planet of its age. There has a lot of volcanic activity in Venus’s past and there could still be volcanic activity there today, so one theory is that every few hundred million years the entire surface of the planet is melted and reformed in epic events called resurfacings — which is why it appears to be young.
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