As both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) plan missions to Venus, scientists are continuing to learn about our sister planet — including volcanic activity that may be occurring in the present day.
Venus’ landscape is littered with volcanoes that were clearly active in the past. But whether any are still erupting in the present is less clear. Many researchers have suspected this to be the case, and evidence has emerged of lava flows that appear to be relatively recent. But direct evidence of the before-and-after effects of an eruption had not emerged until researchers combed through archival data from NASA’s Magellan mission from the 1990s.
Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, reexamined the over 30-year-old data and presented the findings last week at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. Herrick compared radar imagery of the Alta Regio region from February 1991 to data from October of the same year. The area hosts two volcanoes — Maat Mons and Ozza Mons. Looking at the images, he noticed that one volcanic vent near Maat Mons had expanded significantly between datasets. The October data also had a bright feature extending from the vent that looked like a possible lava flow.
Herrick and Scott Hensley, a former Magellan radar team member at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), used computer modeling to compare different geologic scenarios that could cause a square mile-sized (2.2 square kilometers) vent to become misshapen and double in size. The only answer was an eruption.
“Only a couple of the simulations matched the imagery, and the most likely scenario is that volcanic activity occurred on Venus’ surface during Magellan’s mission,” said Hensley in a NASA press release. Hensley argues the finding “confirms there is modern geological activity” on the planet. The results were published March 15 in Science.
