Venus used to be comparable to Earth; it wasn’t a mirror image, but there were many parallels. Then everything changed, and the planet—dubbed the enigmatic twin of Earth—became an acidic hellhole where even lead melted. The planet is a well-known case study of climate change, and scientists are quite curious to unlock its mysteries.
The transition of the planet from a temperate, wet world to an acidic hothouse is now better-understood thanks to a recent study. Researchers discovered that it was caused by long-lasting volcanic activity that released enormous amounts of material over the course of hundreds to thousands of years.
The report also talks about huge igneous provinces that occurred on Earth in the past and led to a number of major extinctions on our planet millions of years ago.
Massive-scale volcanism that lasted for tens of thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of years produced large igneous provinces. More than 100,000 cubic miles of volcanic rock can be deposited by them on the surface. According to the study, the planet’s ancient high-temperature circumstances may have been brought on by enormous volcanic eruptions.
A runaway greenhouse effect would have resulted from a number of these eruptions occurring within a million years, a short period of geologic time. Venus has an atmosphere with a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth and an average temperature of 462 degrees Celsius.
The majority of the five mass extinctions that Earth has experienced were either triggered by or made worse by the types of eruptions that result in large igneous provinces, according to this study and others that came before it. The climate changes brought on by these occurrences on Earth were not as severe as those that led to Venus’ runaway greenhouse effect.
News Mania Desk
