Venus’ beauty treatment? (Image: NASA/Sygma/Corbis)

Venus is leaking lava. Researchers have found oozing volcanoes on our closest planetary neighbour, a discovery that may help solve the planet’s deepest geological riddles.

Past observations revealed that Venus’ surface is “new”, at least in geological terms. Because it doesn’t sport many craters, scientists think the planet has been paved over by upwelling lava within the last billion years. There have been hints of more recent volcanism, too: some terrain looks as young as a few hundred thousand years and we have seen changes in the amount of sulphur – an element produced by volcanoes – in the planet’s atmosphere. But no solid evidence of fresh lava.

Until now. An international team has dug through data from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express probe, which orbited from 2006 until 2014, and found short-lived hot patches they attribute to lava lakes bubbling up along a geological rift.


“By chance we found this bright event, and by carefully analysing the region we found three more,” says Eugene Shalygin of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany.

Frequent flows

The thick Venusian atmosphere makes it tough to see what’s going on at the surface. The team used thermal imaging at wavelengths that can penetrate through the clouds, and then looked only at the clearest images they could get. Even those images were smeared out so that features smaller than 50 kilometres remained blurry.

They found blobs that grew hotter over a few days and then quickly cooled – as might be expected for lava flows quenched under the pressure of the atmosphere.

“This is such beautiful evidence for volcanism,” says Lindy Elkins-Tanton at Arizona State University. Venus, like Earth, has heat from its formation and from radioactive elements trapped inside, and must have had some way to release this. So the discovery isn’t a total shock, she says.

Although lava wasn’t unexpected, it wasn’t clear whether Venus spewed it in frequent trickles or catastrophic, global floods. The team’s findings suggest that some flows are little and often.

There’s also the question of whether Venus was ever habitable. Active volcanoes mean the planet has a “tiny little carbon cycle”, Elkins-Tanton says, which churns between its atmosphere and its insides. We think the exchange of carbon is important for helping planets maintain a balanced climate. While Venus’s cycle clearly wasn’t enough to make it habitable, the fact that it’s there at all may imply that exoplanets like it, with just one tectonic plate, might be able to keep stable atmospheres.

Knowing the composition of the lava would help, Elkins-Tanton says. “We’re a little way away from a Venus mission that would go sample the surface,” she says. “But this gives us some good motivation.”

Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/2015GL064088