Simulations produced by a Brown-led research team offer evidence that Venus once had plate tectonics - a finding that opens the door for the possibility of early life on the planet and insights into its history.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - Venus, a scorching wasteland of a planet according to scientists, may have once had tectonic plate movements similar to those believed to have occurred on early Earth, a new study found. The finding sets up tantalizing scenarios regarding the possibility of early life on Venus, its evolutionary past and the history of the solar system.
Writing in Nature Astronomy, a team of scientists led by Brown University researchers describes using atmospheric data from Venus and computer modeling to show that the composition of the planet's current atmosphere and surface pressure would only have been possible as a result of an early form of plate tectonics, a process critical to life that involves multiple continental plates pushing, pulling and sliding beneath one another.
On Earth, this process intensified over billions of years, forming new continents and mountains, and leading to chemical reactions that stabilized the planet's surface temperature, resulting in an environment more conducive to the development of life.
Venus, on the other hand, Earth's nearest neighbor and sister planet, went in the opposite direction and today has surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead. One explanation is that the planet has always been thought to have what's known as a "stagnant lid," meaning its surface has only a single plate with minimal amounts of give, movement and gasses being released into the atmosphere.
The new paper posits that this wasn't always the case. To account for the abundance of nitrogen and carbon dioxide present in Venus' atmosphere, the researchers conclude that Venus must have had plate tectonics sometime after the planet formed, about 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. The paper suggests that this early tectonic movement, like on Earth, would have been limited in terms of the number of plates moving and in how much they shifted. It also would have been happening on Earth and Venus simultaneously.
"One of the big picture takeaways is that we very likely had two planets at the same time in the same solar system operating in a plate tectonic regime - the same mode of tectonics that allowed for the life that we see on Earth today," said Matt Weller, the study's lead author who completed the work while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brown and is now at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
This bolsters the possibility of microbial life on ancient Venus and shows that at one point the two planets - which are in the same solar neighborhood, are about the same size, and have the same mass, density and volume - were more alike than previously thought before diverging.
