Active
volcanoes on planet Venus?
-Dr. Abdul Ruff
______________
Human advances in discovering the universe in its entirety
keep making breakthroughs off and on in knowing the earth and space with
details.
The scientists from the European Space Agency's Venus Express
mission have found strong evidence of active lava flows on the planet Venus,
Earth's nearest neighbour.
Analyzing data from the Space Agency's mission, the
scientists found transient spikes 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 lava on
the surface, researchers said. "We were able to show strong evidence that
Venus is volcanically, and thus internally, active today," said co-author
James W Head, a geologist at Brown University.
The head of the mission said it is a major finding that can
help us better understand the evolution of our own planet. The hotspots turned
up in the thermal imaging taken by the Venus Express spacecraft's Venus
Monitoring Camera. The data showed spikes in temperature of several hundred
degrees Fahrenheit in spots ranging in size from 1 square kilometre to over 200
kilometres. The spots were clustered in a large rift 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 previously
mapped the region as part of a global geologic map of Venus generated from the
Soviet Venera missions in the 1980s and US 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. He added that the active anomalies
detected by Venus Express fall exactly where we had mapped these relatively
young deposits and suggest ongoing activity.
The latest finding is consistent with other data from Venus
Express that have hinted at very recent volcanic activity. The observation of
hotspots by Venus Express, combined with the geologic mapping from Venera and
Magellan, make a strong case for a volcanically active Venus, Head said. The
research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
|