The planet Venus could remain geologically active today. An international team of scientists used old radar images from NASA’s Magallane mission that ended in 2004 to study the surface of Venus. They found places where chunks of crust slid and turned like “blocks of ice.” The study suggests that Venus may be generating geological activity from deep within the planet, contradicting the earlier belief that the crust of Venus was a solid block; It featured an immobile solid outer shell or lithosphere. It seems that this is not so.
Like ice floating in the ocean
Much of Venus’s fragile upper crust breaks into pieces that jostle and move, and the slow churning of Venus’s mantle beneath the surface could be responsible. Experts compare the relatively recent activity to the way ice fragments move in the sea in Earth’s polar regions.
Specifically, researchers have identified a pattern of tectonic deformation that suggests that many of the planet’s lowlands have been fragmented into discrete crustal blocks and that these blocks have moved from one another in the geologically recent past. To reach this conclusion, they created a computer model of this deformation and discovered that the slow movement of the planet’s interior can explain the style of tectonics seen on the surface.
“We have identified a previously unrecognized tectonic deformation pattern on Venus, one that is driven by interior motion just like it is on Earth,” says Paul Byrne, planetary researcher in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North State University. de Carolina and leader of the work that publishes PNAS. “Although it is different from the tectonics we currently see on Earth, it is still evidence that interior motion is expressed on the planet’s surface.”
Not only does this offer information about the planet Venus itself, but it could help us better understand the evolution and dynamics of tectonics on early Earth because, by all accounts, our planet is essentially a freak in the solar system. Plate tectonics is one of those characteristics that stand out, as our planet draws a divided mosaic of mobile tectonic plates.
There is no plate tectonics on Mercury, Mars, or the Moon. Nor on Venus, something that has always been strange to us , considering the similar sizes and geological compositions that both planets have.
The tectonic activity of Venus could be proof that, on a global scale, below the planet’s surface, a molten region called the mantle could be flowing. Although the lithosphere of Venus is not thick enough to form plates that subduct, it is thick enough to have fragmented into blocks that push and pull.
Referencia: “A Globally Fragmented and Mobile Lithosphere on Venus” by Paul K. Byrne, Richard C. Ghail, A. M. Celâl Şengör, Peter B. James, Christian Klimczak and Sean C. Solomon, 21 June 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2025919118
