Was Venus Potentially Habitable Until A Mysterious Event Happened?

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – It is likely that Venus had temperate planet-hosting liquid water for 2-3 billion years until a dramatic transformation starting over 700 million years ago resurfaced around 80 percent of the planet.

To see if Venus might ever have had a stable climate capable of supporting liquid water, Dr. Michael Way and his colleague, Anthony Del Genio, of the Goddard Institute for Space Science have created a series of five simulations assuming different levels of water coverage.

Source: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech

In all five scenarios, they found that Venus was able to maintain stable temperatures between a maximum of about 50 degrees Celsius and a minimum of about 20 degrees Celsius for around three billion years.

A temperate climate might even have been maintained on Venus today had there not been a series of events that caused a release, or ‘outgassing’, of carbon dioxide stored in the rocks of the planet approximately 700-750 million years ago.

“Our hypothesis is that Venus may have had a stable climate for billions of years. It is possible that the near-global resurfacing event is responsible for its transformation from an Earth-like climate to the hellish hot-house we see today,” Way, said in a press release.

Many researchers believe that Venus is beyond the inner boundary of our Solar System’s habitable zone and is too close to the Sun to support liquid water, the new study suggests that this might not be the case.

“Venus currently has almost twice the solar radiation that we have at Earth. However, in all the scenarios we have modeled, we have found that Venus could still support surface temperatures amenable for liquid water,” said Way.

The dramatic transformation of Venus remains a mystery, although probably linked to the planet’s volcanic activity. The presence of large amounts of carbon dioxide triggered a runaway greenhouse effect, which has resulted in the scorching 462-degree average temperatures found on Venus today.

“Something happened on Venus where a huge amount of gas was released into the atmosphere and couldn’t be re-absorbed by the rocks. On Earth we have some examples of large-scale outgassing, for instance, the creation of the Siberian Traps 500 million years ago which is linked to mass extinction, but nothing on this scale,” said Way.

“It completely transformed Venus.”

More missions to study Venus are needed to better understand the planet’s history and evolution.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff