Swiss researchers find evidence of active volcanoes on Venus

Venus is geologically active even though researchers had assumed the opposite. Swiss researchers have managed to find evidence of active volcanoes on Earth’s sister planet.

Venus is an inhospitable place where temperatures reach several hundred degrees, and there are no oceans like those on Earth. Nevertheless, there were visible signs of tectonic activity, such as rift systems – some of them enormous – according to a press release issued on Friday by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich. These resembled those on Earth, such as the African Rift Valley. On Venus, there are rift valleys up to 10,000 kilometres long.

It is unclear when these rifts formed. Geoscientists had assumed that they were formed over a 100 million years ago and are therefore relics of the past.

However, according to the press release, ETH Zurich researchers led by Taras Gerya, Professor of Geodynamics in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, have now used a new computer model to show that some of the rift valleys may well have formed more recently. The study has just been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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Using a new computer model, lead author Xi Yang and his colleagues simulated the rifts in high resolution and in three dimensions for the first time. This enabled these structures to be accurately represented in the simulations and their formation to be better explained. Previous simulations relied on simplified assumptions regarding material properties and were often only two-dimensional.

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Translated from German, reviewed by an English Department journalist.