Could Earth end up like Venus?  

Volcanoes play an important role

Venus is often described as a hell planet, with temperatures reaching 464 degrees Celsius and a toxic atmosphere. For this reason, of all the Russian missions to the surface of the planet, only four managed to transmit an image before succumbing to the extreme conditions. However, Venus is also referred to as Earth’s twin planet, and its current conditions are very different from ancient Venus.

Millions of years ago, Venus had an atmosphere similar to Earth’s, and it also had significant amounts of water on its surface. It is even possible that some simple life forms existed on Venus at one time, but of course this is impossible to prove now.

A new study claims that massive volcanic eruptions over a long period of time are the reason the planet changed to what we see today. Volcanic activity has also shaped life on Earth and it seems that by chance we did not know the fate of Venus. The Earth also experienced long periods of continuous volcanic activity that lasted hundreds or thousands of years, covering vast areas of the surface with volcanic rocks. We know that over the past 500 million years, this activity has coincided with periods of climate change and mass extinctions.

The study argues that the massive volcanic activity on Venus created its current atmosphere with extreme temperatures and pressure. In fact, he claims that an intense activity that lasted only a million years was enough to create a permanent greenhouse effect that trapped all the heat of the planet without it being able to escape into space.

Our planet has experienced five mass extinctions of species and all of them are related to increased volcanic activity. However, it always came back and we didn’t have the luck of Aphrodite. So what was different about them?

The answer is probably the scale of the explosions. The surface of Venus is covered by 80% with volcanic rocks. Sulfur in the atmosphere is also evidence of intense volcanic activity. Additionally, Venus has far fewer craters on its surface than expected, indicating intense volcanic activity over the past hundreds of millions of years. The study found that the volcanic events overlapped each other, and before the planet could remove the gases from its atmosphere from one event, another followed, adding to the permanent greenhouse effect.

What worries scientists is whether volcanic events influence each other.

During periods of increased activity, the probability of simultaneous events is higher than average. On the other hand, during recession, this probability decreases to the average. It is not clear which of these phenomena predominates. We found that the probability of the largest volcanic activity in Earth’s recorded history coinciding with such an event is 30%. Multiple such events can drive a calm, habitable environment on rocky planets into a “hell” state, given their Earth-like geochemistry and mantle dynamics.

Future missions to Venus will reveal more about its history, such as NASA’s VERITAS and DAVINCI.

DAVINCI’s main goal is to reveal the history of water on Venus and tell us when it disappeared, giving us more information about how the climate of Venus has changed over time.

So for some reason, Earth has remained habitable for billions of years and Venus has not. We may never fully understand all the factors that made Earth and Venus so different, but volcanic activity clearly played a role.