Venus Was Once More Earth-Like, but Climate Change Made It Uninhabitable

By Richard Ernst, The Conversation

16 December 20

e can learn a lot about climate change from Venus, our sister planet. Venus currently has a surface temperature of 450℃ (the temperature of an oven's self-cleaning cycle) and an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide (96 percent) with a density 90 times that of Earth's.

Venus is a very strange place, totally uninhabitable, except perhaps in the clouds some 60 kilometers up where the recent discovery of phosphine may suggest floating microbial life. But the surface is totally inhospitable.

However, Venus once likely had an Earth-like climate. According to recent climate modeling, for much of its history Venus had surface temperatures similar to present day Earth. It likely also had oceans, rain, perhaps snow, maybe continents and plate tectonics, and even more speculatively, perhaps even surface life.

Less than one billion years ago, the climate dramatically changed due to a runaway greenhouse effect. It can be speculated that an intensive period of volcanism pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause this great climate change event that evaporated the oceans and caused the end of the water cycle.

Evidence of Change

This hypothesis from the climate modelers inspired Sara Khawja, a master's student in my group (co-supervised with geoscientist Claire Samson), to look for evidence in Venusian rocks for this proposed climatic change event.

Since the early 1990s, my Carleton University research team — and more recently my Siberian team at Tomsk State University — have been mapping and interpreting the geological and tectonic history of Earth's remarkable sister planet.

Soviet Venera and Vega missions of the 1970s and 1980s did land on Venus and take pictures and evaluated the composition of the rocks, before the landers failed due to the high temperature and pressure. However, our most comprehensive view of the surface of Venus has been provided by NASA's Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s, which used radar to see through the dense cloud layer and produce detailed images of more than 98 percent of Venus's surface.