If you could peer through the 160 miles of noxious clouds driven by hurricane-force winds over Venus, you’d witness a barren landscape strewn with volcanoes, mountains and high plateaus. Scientists have long suspected that these features formed hundreds of millions of years ago. And today, the thinking went, Venus is geologically dead. But now a cascade of new research in is forcing astronomers to reconsider that idea.

Explaining Venus’ young surface

Venus is often called Earth’s twin because the neighboring planets are nearly identical in size and mass. But any comparisons end there. Venus doesn’t have a moon or a magnetic field. Its atmosphere is a stifling 100 times thicker than Earth’s. In fact, Venus’ runaway greenhouse effect leaves it with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead — averaging around 850 degrees Fahrenheit. But as scientists take a closer look at what’s happening beneath Venus’s clouds, they’re noticing it has some geologic similarities to Earth and more action than originally thought.

“Over the last eight years, I think there’s been an increasing awareness among some people that there’s a lot of activity recorded in Venus, more than we had recognized,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Unlike other rocky bodies in the inner solar system, Venus’ surface is free of scars from asteroid impacts. Scientists have explained this young surface by suggesting some catastrophic event resurfaced the planet between 250 million and 750 million years ago. The idea was that much or all of the planet’s rigid outer layer — the lithosphere — sank into Venus’ interior and left the whole planet smooth.

Yet new research on Venus’ looking at its center of mass, surface geochemistry, and spikes in volcanic gasses, suggest that the truth is far less cataclysmic. Instead of one large event, the research proposes Venus’ 1,600-plus volcanoes are still active – and are constantly repaving portions of the Venusian surface. Studies of the iron content of certain lava flows show they aren’t weathered, meaning they may have formed less than 250,000 years ago — recent in geological terms.

“I think everyone would agree it’s time to stop thinking that catastrophic resurfacing is the best interpretation,” said Suzanne Smrekar, a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “It’s one interpretation, but it’s not one that’s most consistent with surface geology.”