American scientists have just released a global map showing the distribution of volcanoes on the surface of Venus. And surprisingly, the hellish planet would have a lot more to offer than we thought: up to 85,000 buildings, old and new, have been identified on its surface.
The recent confirmation of active volcanism on the surface of Venus shows that Earth’s twin planet is very much alive from a geological point of view. A new study completes this information and is intended to provide a research basis for future analyzes of Venusian volcanism.
Two Washington University scientists have actually created a map summarizing all the volcanic structures identified so far on the planet’s surface. A mapping work highlighting the importance of volcanism on Venus. In fact, no fewer than 85,000 volcanoes have been identified. That’s a lot more than previously assumed. They have been grouped into several categories intended to allow a better understanding of the volcanic processes that have taken place or are currently taking place on the planet. The buildings are in fact represented or not according to their size and the presence of deformations.
An overwhelming majority of small volcanoes
We find that 99% of the identified volcanoes are small, less than 5 kilometers in diameter. Large volcanoes with a diameter between 5 and 100 kilometers or more than 100 kilometers are therefore relatively rare. Analysis of the data also shows that there are very few buildings with diameters between 20 and 100 kilometers, an important point that can be interpreted as limited magma supply or rather short eruption duration.
The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, also shows the correlations between the distribution of volcanic structures and certain geophysical data, such as crustal thickness.
An indispensable database for future investigations
Future studies will thus be able to observe the distribution of these structures on a planetary scale and draw conclusions about past and current volcanic activity, as well as about the magmatic processes at the origin of these volcanoes and, more generally, about the geology of Venus and its dynamics.
This map, which is publicly available to facilitate use by scientists, was created from Magellan probe radar imagery data from the 1990s, old data with insufficient resolution to depict smaller structures per kilometer. It is therefore very likely that the actual number of volcanoes on the surface of Venus is much larger. To verify this we will have to wait until the 2030s for the launch of two missions, one by NASA (Veritas orbiter and DaVinci probe) and one by ESA (EnVision), aimed at mapping the surface of Venus image in high resolution.