Did Venus have oceans before it became a hell planet?  

New climate models reveal

Venus may be Earth’s twin planet but it is also known as the hell planet due to its high surface temperatures and toxic gases. However billions of years ago it may have been habitable with large oceans of water.

Two University of Chicago planetary scientists developed a climate model to determine the history of Venus’ atmosphere and the rate at which it lost its oxygen.

Right now Venus is an extremely inhospitable planet, dry and with little oxygen. The atmosphere is made up of 96% carbon dioxide and 3% nitrogen, with the remaining 1% made up of other gases such as sulfur dioxide. Its atmosphere is extremely dense, so heat cannot escape. Venus has the highest surface temperature of any planet in the Solar System, averaging 464 degrees Celsius.

In the early history of the Solar System, however, when the Sun was less powerful, Venus’ climate may have been more temperate, with lakes and oceans of liquid water. Its similarities to Earth lead several scientists to conclude that it may have had water only a billion years ago.

However, the lack of oxygen worries them. If the planet did have water, then as Venus warmed, the water would evaporate into the atmosphere, dissociating into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen may have escaped into space, but oxygen had to remain in the atmosphere. So where could he have gone?

According to the scientists’ new model, which they ran 94,080 times, one possibility is that the oxygen was bound by the carbon produced by the volcanoes to create carbon dioxide. However, they emphasize that such a thing is rather unlikely. It is most likely that either the oxygen escaped into space, or it was bound on the surface of the planet, oxidizing the magma of the volcanoes and creating rocks such as basalt.

By assessing how volcanically active Venus was in the past, scientists were able to estimate how much water the planet might have had. The oceans of Venus were not like those of Earth, since they were no more than 300 meters deep. This means that Venus may have been habitable at some point in its history, but that window of time was extremely short. Future missions will attempt to measure the composition of Venus’ surface to determine whether the hell planet was indeed once a paradise.

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .