But I think the reasonable interpretation suggests that Venus is relatively Earth-like in the frequency of volcanic eruptions.ĭANIEL: Around places like Hawaii and Iceland. HERRICK: Of course, I could have been very lucky and seen the only thing that happened in the last million years on Venus. HERRICK: The outline has changed, and the thing's actually gotten larger and looks shallower as well.ĭANIEL: That is, sometime during 1991, Herrick speculates the volcano erupted, forming a lava lake within the vent. But the shape of that vent differs between the two images. It's a vent, the area where a volcano erupts, discharging its lava, ash and rock. HERRICK: So can you see that? You're looking at PowerPoint, hopefully.ĭANIEL: Herrick fires up a slide with two side-by-side black-and-white images taken eight months apart of the same spot on the north side of the volcano, each one some 15, 20 miles across. And after a couple months of looking, he found something. HERRICK: It's a needle-in-a-haystack search without any guarantee that there's a needle, right?ĭANIEL: He focused his search around the highest volcano on Venus, Maat Mons, named after the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice. He pored over radar surface imagery collected by the Magellan spacecraft in the early '90s. HERRICK: The time between eruptions could be months, years or tens of thousands of years.ĭANIEL: Herrick set out to try to narrow down that time window by searching for evidence of recent volcanic activity. So it's clear that Venus is volcanically active, but it's not clear exactly how active. ROBERT HERRICK: Aside from Earth, it's the only one that has sort of true mountain ranges and huge variety of volcanic features.ĭANIEL: Features like lava fields, canals carved by molten rock and hundreds, if not thousands, of volcanoes. Science reporter Ari Daniel has more.ĪRI DANIEL, BYLINE: Despite all its hostility, Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor, is pretty similar to Earth, so much so that University of Alaska Fairbanks planetary scientist Robert Herrick calls it our true sibling in the solar system. And now new research offers a new volcanic insight. The forces that shape the planet, which is in some ways similar to our own, have largely remained a mystery. Thinking crushing pressures, a toxic atmosphere, surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead. But the planet Venus is, well, a hellscape. In Greek and Roman mythology, Venus is the goddess of love and beauty.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |