Where to flee in case of an apocalypse? This is the question that more than one person has asked themselves when seeing news about the damage that humanity does to the Earth every day. Contrary to fictional movies, which raise the possibility of colonizing Mars, NASA scientists analyze another planet in the solar system that could harbor life, it is about Venus.
According to data collected by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the second planet in the solar system may be losing heat due to geological activity in regions called coronas.
Since Earth and Venus are rocky planets of similar size and chemical composition, it is assumed that they should lose their internal heat to space at the same rate. However, the mechanism by which Venus loses heat is still unknown, despite the fact that the Earth’s is well known by experts.
A study based on data collected three decades ago by NASA’s Magellan mission takes a new look at the cooling process of Venus and promises to explain this phenomenon by analyzing the planet’s upper layer.
So far it is known that the Earth has a hot core that influences the temperature of the surrounding mantle, which transports that heat to the rigid outer rocky layer of the planet, also known as the lithosphere. The heat is lost to space and the upper region of the mantle cools. This drives tectonic processes on the Earth’s surface and keeps the tectonic plates moving.
In contrast, Venus lacks plate tectonics, so scientists have wondered for years how it loses heat and what processes shape its surface.
These unknowns are addressed by the new NASA study, which takes up the observations and data collected by the Magellan spacecraft during the early 1990s of nearly circular geological features of Venus called coronas.
By re-measuring these coronas using Magellan images, the researchers concluded that these areas tend to be located where the planet’s lithosphere is thinnest and most active.
“For a long time we have clung to the idea that the Venusian lithosphere is stagnant and thick, but our view is evolving,” said Suzanne Smrekar, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the study published in Nature Geoscience.
In summary, the researchers found that the coronae on Venus are circular geologic structures with ridges and trenches, have a much thinner lithosphere than previously thought, with an average thickness of around 11 kilometers. This suggests that these regions have significant geological activity and higher-than-Earth-average heat flux. Although Venus does not have plate tectonics like Earth, the coronas are allowing heat to escape from the planet’s interior through floating plumes of molten rock, suggesting that they are actively shaping the planet’s surface.
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“Although Venus does not have tectonics similar to Earth’s, these regions of thin lithosphere appear to be leaking significant amounts of heat, similar to areas where new tectonic plates are forming on Earth’s seafloor,” he says. smrekar.
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