It Looks Like There are Still Active Volcanoes on Venus

A radar image of Maat Mons on Venus, from the Magellan spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Venus’ surface is no stranger to volcanoes. Radar images show more than 1,000 volcanic structures on the planet. But for the most part, they appear to be ancient and inactive.

Now a new study says that Venus is still volcanically active, and has identified 37 volcanic structures that were recently active. If true, there’s more going on inside Venus than thought.

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It Was Almost Certainly an Asteroid Impact that Wiped Out the Dinosaurs. In Fact, Volcanoes Might Have Helped Life Recover

An ankylosaurus enjoying a drink of water while the asteroid strikes in the distance. Image Credit: Fabio Manucci

It seems almost certain that an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs. But only almost. Another competing theory won’t completely go away: the extinction-by-volcano theory.

A new study from the UK piles more evidence on the asteroid side of the debate, while adding a new volcanic twist. These researchers say that volcanic activity actually helped life recover from the asteroid strike.

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During Mass Extinction Events, Volcanoes Were Releasing About the Same Amount of CO2 as We Are Today

The Mount Redoubt volcano in Alaska. Image Credit: By R. Clucas - http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-39/album.html and http://gallery.usgs.gov/photos/03_29_2013_otk7Nay4LH_03_29_2013_5#.UrvS2vfTnrc, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5768911

200 million years ago, a mass extinction event wiped out about 76% of all species on Earth—both terrestrial and marine. That event was called the end-Triassic extinction, or the Jurassic-Triassic (J-T) extinction event. At that time, the world experienced many of the same things as Earth is facing now, including a warming climate and the acidification of the oceans.

A new paper shows that pulses of volcanic eruptions were responsible, and that those pulses released the same amount of CO2 as humans are releasing today.

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The Evidence is Leaning More and More Towards an Asteroid Ending the Dinosaurs

What an asteroid hitting the Earth might look like. Image credit: NASA/Don Davis.

Which camp are you in: volcanoes? Or asteroids?

When it comes to the extinction of the dinosaurs, science has whittled it down to those two possibilities. The asteroid strike has been the leading candidate for quite some time now, but those darn volcanoes refuse to stand down.

A new study is presenting even more evidence that it was the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, and not volcanoes.

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A Brand New Island in the Pacific has Survived 5 Years

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai with the ship SSV Robert C. Seamans. Image Credit: Captain Chris Nolan (Sea Education Association) of the SSV Robert C. Seamans (Oct. 2019).

A surtseyan eruption is a volcanic eruption in shallow water. It’s named after the island Surtsey, off the coast of iceland. In 2015, a surtseyan eruption in the Tongan Archipelago created the island Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai. Despite the odds, that island is still there almost five years later.

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Io’s Largest Volcano, Loki, Erupts Every 500 Days. Any Day Now, It’ll Erupt Again.

This picture from Voyager 1 shows the volcano Loki on Jupiter’s moon Io. When this picture was taken, the main eruptive activity came from the lower left of the dark linear feature (perhaps a rift) in the center. Below is the "lava lake," a U-shaped dark area about 200 kilometers across. Credit: NASA/JPL

Jupiter’s moon Io is in stark contrast to the other three Galilean moons. While Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa all appear to have subsurface oceans, Io is a volcanic world, covered with more than 400 active volcanoes. In fact, Io is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.

Io’s largest volcano is named Loki, after a God in Norse mythology. It’s the most active and most powerful volcano in the Solar System. Since 1979, we’ve known that it’s active and that it’s both continuous and variable. And since 2002, thanks to a research paper in the Geophysical Research Letters, we’ve known that it erupts regularly.

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Ceres is a Strange Place, Including a Volcanic Peak 4,000 Meters High Made From Bubbling Salt Water, Mud and Rock

A visual image and a gravitational field image of Ceres. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Ceres, at almost 1,000 km (620 miles) in diameter, is the largest body in the asteroid belt. Between 2015 and 2018, NASA’s ion-powered Dawn spacecraft visited the dwarf planet, looking for clues to help us understand how our Solar System formed. Ceres is the first dwarf planet ever visited by a spacecraft.

Now that scientists have worked with the data from Dawn, we’re starting to see just how unusual Ceres is. One of the most shocking of Dawn’s findings is the volcano Ahuna Mons, a feature that seems out of place on this tiny world. Now scientists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have figured out how this strange feature formed on this intriguing little planet.

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Metal Asteroid Psyche Might Have Had Volcanoes of Molten Iron

An artist's illustration of a metallic asteroid like Psyche. Image Credit: Elena Hartley/USC
An artist's illustration of a metallic asteroid like Psyche. Credit: Elena Hartley/USC

Imagine a time in the Solar System’s past, when the asteroids were not solid rock, but blobs of molten iron. It sounds strange, but that may have been the case. And in the right conditions, some of those asteroids would have sprouted volcanoes. One of those asteroids, Psyche, is the destination for a NASA mission.

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Massive Volcanic Eruptions 66 Million Years Ago Happened Almost Exactly When the Dinosaurs Died Off

The Deccan traps are an area of igneous rock in India that formed during a time of intense volcanic activity about 65 million years ago. Image Credit: Gerta Keller, Department of Geosciences, Princeton University
The Deccan traps are an area of igneous rock in India that formed during a time of intense volcanic activity about 65 million years ago. Image Credit: Gerta Keller, Department of Geosciences, Princeton University

Everyone knows an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs, right? Lots of evidence shows that the Chicxulub impact event had terrible consequences for the dinosaurs. But the picture is a little more complicated than that. Extreme volcanic activity may have contributed to the extinction.

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A Rapid Rise in Temperature Led to the Worst Extinction in our Planet’s History

This illustration shows the percentage of marine animals that went extinct during Earth's worst extinction at the end of the Permian era by latitude, from the model (black line) and from the fossil record (blue dots).A greater percentage of marine animals survived in the tropics than at the poles. The color of the water shows the temperature change, with red being most severe warming and yellow less warming. At the top is the supercontinent Pangaea, with massive volcanic eruptions emitting carbon dioxide. The images below the line represent some of the 96 percent of marine species that died during the event. [Includes fossil drawings by Ernst Haeckel/Wikimedia; Blue crab photo by Wendy Kaveney/Flickr; Atlantic cod photo by Hans-Petter Fjeld/Wikimedia; Chambered nautilus photo by John White/CalPhotos.]Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch/University of Washington
This illustration shows the percentage of marine animals that went extinct during Earth's worst extinction at the end of the Permian era by latitude, from the model (black line) and from the fossil record (blue dots).A greater percentage of marine animals survived in the tropics than at the poles. The color of the water shows the temperature change, with red being most severe warming and yellow less warming. At the top is the supercontinent Pangaea, with massive volcanic eruptions emitting carbon dioxide. The images below the line represent some of the 96 percent of marine species that died during the event. [Includes fossil drawings by Ernst Haeckel/Wikimedia; Blue crab photo by Wendy Kaveney/Flickr; Atlantic cod photo by Hans-Petter Fjeld/Wikimedia; Chambered nautilus photo by John White/CalPhotos.]Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch/University of Washington

Everyone knows about the extinction of the dinosaurs. A cataclysmic asteroid strike about 66 million years ago (mya) caused the Death of the Dinosaurs. But there’ve been several mass extinctions in the Earth’s history, and they didn’t involve killer asteroids. The worst extinction was caused by a rapid rise in temperature.

Earth’s most severe extinction occurred long before the killer asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. It happened some 252 mya, and it marked the end of what’s called the Permian Period. The extinction is known as the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, the End-Permian Extinction, or more simply, “The Great Dying.” Up to 70% of terrestrial vertebrates and up to 96% of all marine species were extinguished during The Great Dying.

How did it happen? Could it happen again?

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