An international team of scientists has found some of the best evidence yet that Venus, Earth's nearest neighbor, is volcanically¹ active. In combing through data from the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission, the scientists found transient spikes² in temperature at several spots on the planet's surface. The hotspots, which were found to flash and fade over the course of just a few days, appear to be generated by active flows of lava³ on the surface.

 

"We were able to show strong evidence that Venus is volcanically, and thus internally, active today," said James W. Head, a geologist⁴ at Brown University and co-author of a paper describing the new research. "This is a major finding that helps us understand the evolution of planets like our own."

 

The research is published online in Geophysical Research Letters.

 

The hotspots turned up in thermal⁵ imaging taken by the Venus Express spacecraft's Venus Monitoring Camera. The data showed spikes in temperature of several hundred degrees Fahrenheit⁶ in spots ranging in size from 1 square kilometer to over 200 kilometers.

 

The spots were clustered in a large rift⁷ zone called Ganiki Chasma. Rift zones are formed by stretching of the crust by internal forces and hot magma that rises toward the surface. Head and Russian colleague Mikhail Ivanov had previously⁸ mapped the region as part of a global geologic⁹ map of Venus generated from the Soviet¹⁰ Venera missions in the 1980s and U.S. Magellan mission in the 1990s. The mapping work had shown that Ganiki Chasma was quite young, geologically speaking, but just how young wasn't clear until now.

 

"We knew that Ganiki Chasma was the result of volcanism that had occurred fairly recently in geological terms, but we didn't know if it formed yesterday or was a billion years old," Head said. "The active anomalies detected by Venus Express fall exactly where we had mapped these relatively¹¹ young deposits and suggest ongoing¹² activity."

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