
Venus Isn't (Geologically) Dead
No other rocky world in our solar system has anything approaching Earth's degree of geological activity. At least, that's what scientists used to think. Mercury, Mars and the moon appear essentially inert. But Venus, our closest neighbor and the only other large rocky world around the sun, is now starting to look far livelier than once thought. A fresh look at decades-old data from NASA's Magellan probe has found evidence of active tectonics—around dozens of circular volcanic features called coronae—on Venus today. The finding, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, provides some of the best evidence to date that Venus isn't dead—at least, not when it comes to tectonics.
'Venus works differently than the Earth but not as different as what was originally assumed,' says the study's co-lead author Anna Gülcher of the University of Bern in Switzerland. 'We should think of tectonics as not just a black-and-white picture.'
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'Questions as fundamental as 'Is Venus alive today?' are extremely hard to answer,' says planetary scientist Paul Byrne of the University of Washington in St. Louis, who wasn't involved in the study. This new evidence of geological activity around the coronae suggests 'the heart of Venus still beats today. I think that's extremely invaluable for us to understand the big, rocky world next door.'
Venus is called ' Earth's evil twin ' for good reason: the planet is almost exactly as large as the Earth and is made of roughly the same stuff. But while Earth is a verdant water world, Venus is a scorched hellscape with temperatures hot enough to melt lead, a dreary, permanently overcast sky and air so thick that it crushes spacecraft as if they were tin cans.
For a while, Venus was widely assumed to be just as dead on the inside as it is on the outside. Lacking any obvious plate tectonics—which can help release a world's internal heat—Venus's interior was thought to instead just simmer like the contents of a tight-lidded pot on a stove. According to one popular hypothesis, the pot had eventually boiled over: after eons of frustrated heating, some 800 million years ago, the planet's outer shell buckled, and Venus's entire surface was paved over with immense outpourings of fresh lava. And, the thinking went, with all that heat dissipated, the planet's geology basically shut down.
But evidence is mounting that Venus is, geologically at least, still kicking. Most notably, in 2023 two researchers scrutinizing 30-year-old Magellan data realized that the probe had caught a volcanic eruption in the act: radar images of the volcano Maat Mons that were taken months apart showed what looked like a caldera collapse and subsequent lava flow. Venus, it seems, still has active volcanoes. Some researchers now think it could have active tectonics, too. And in 2020 Gülcher and her colleagues showed via simulations of Venusian tectonics that the planet's mysterious, ring-shaped coronae could be a good place to look for such activity.
Tectonics refers to the processes that deform a rocky planet's brittle outer shell. On Earth, this outer shell—the lithosphere, which includes the crust and part of the upper mantle—is broken into tectonic plates that drift over the hot, plastic mantle. When two plates collide, one of them can slide below the other and dive down into the mantle in a process called subduction. On Earth, subducting plates start melting as they sink, feeding volcanoes along plate boundaries. Such volcanoes include Japan's Mount Fuji and western North America's Cascade Range.
Unlike Earth, Venus doesn't have global plate tectonics. The new study suggests, however, that around coronae, something quite similar to subduction could be happening.
Gülcher and her colleagues simulated several tectonic processes that might be occurring around coronae and compared their predictions to real observations collected by the Magellan probe 30 years ago. The comparisons were more than skin-deep: the researchers used gravity data to take a peek underground. Hot rock is generally less dense than cold rock, and these density variations from place to place can correspondingly alter the strength of a planet's gravitational field. So Magellan's spatial mapping of Venus's gravity can 'see' if there's hot, light material under a corona—a sign that rock is actively rising up from the mantle below.
Of the 75 coronae that the team could resolve in Magellan's gravitational maps, 52 seem to be geologically active. The predicted and real data lined up so well for some coronae that 'we could hardly believe our eyes,' says the study's other co-lead author Gael Cascioli of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Most of the active coronae were encircled by trenches, a hint that old crust dives into Venus's mantle around these rocky rings, where it is driven downward as buoyant rock rises from below in the middle of each corona's ring structure. 'Basically, if something goes down, something goes up,' Gülcher says. Where the lithosphere is softer and more pliable, bits of it could break off and 'drip' down into the mantle in globs. In places where the lithosphere is stiffer, entire slabs of crust could subduct in a small-scale, circular mirror of Earth's subduction zones, like those that form the Pacific Ocean's famed volcanic Ring of Fire.
Working with 30-year-old data comes with an obvious limitation: the data quality often isn't very good compared with newer observations. The new study's researchers did well with what they had, Byrne says. But NASA's upcoming VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) mission could do much better—and the team predicted exactly how much better in the paper. 'The improvement would be extraordinary,' Cascioli says. Instead of being limited to analyzing 75 coronae, VERITAS's gravity dataset should allow scientists to examine hundreds of the strange ring-shaped features.
For the foreseeable future, Venus is the only other large, rocky world that we or our robotic emissaries will ever reach. Understanding why Earth and Venus ended up so different despite having so much in common helps us understand our own planet—and whether the rocky worlds we're beginning to glimpse around other stars are more like Earth or instead resemble its evil twin.
'Venus is the world that we probably understand least,' Byrne says. 'Yet it's the one, arguably, I think, that's the most important.'

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Ancient creatures Animal storiesFacebookTweetLink Paleontologists have discovered remarkable fossils in the Grand Canyon that reveal fresh details about the emergence of complex life half a billion years ago. The newfound remains of fauna from the region suggest that it offered ideal conditions for life to flourish and diversify, in a 'Goldilocks zone' between harsh extremes elsewhere. This evolutionary opportunity produced a multitude of early animals, including oddballs with peculiar adaptations for survival, according to new research. During the Cambrian explosion, which played out in the coastal waters of Earth's oceans about 540 million years ago, most animal body types that exist today emerged in a relatively short time span, scientists believe. Back then, the Grand Canyon was closer to the equator, and the region was covered by a warm, shallow sea teeming with burgeoning life — aquatic creatures resembling modern-day shrimp, pill bugs and slugs — all developing new ways to exploit the abundant resources. Researchers turned to the Grand Canyon's layers of sedimentary rock to unlock secrets of this pivotal moment in the history of life, digging into the flaky, claylike shale of the Bright Angel Formation where most of the canyon's Cambrian-era fossils have been found. The study team expected to recover mostly the fossilized remains of hard-shelled invertebrates typical of the region. Instead, the team unearthed something unusual: rocks containing well-preserved internal fragments of tiny soft-bodied mollusks, crustaceans, and priapulids, also known as penis worms. 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Scientists still debate what drove the Cambrian explosion, but the most popular theory is that oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere slowly began to increase about 550 million years ago, said Erik Sperling, an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Stanford University. Oxygen provided a much more efficient way to metabolize food, giving animals more energy to mobilize and hunt for prey, suggested Sperling, who was not involved in the new study. 'The (emergence of) predators kicked off these escalatory arms races, and then we basically got the explosion of different ways of doing business,' Sperling said. During the Cambrian, the shallow sea covering the Grand Canyon was especially oxygen-rich thanks to its perfect, 'Goldilocks' depth, said Mussini, a doctoral student in Earth sciences at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Ranging from 40 to 50 meters (about 130 to 165 feet) in depth, the ecosystem was undisturbed by the shoreline's constant waves shifting around sediments, and sunlight was still able to reach photosynthesizing plants on the seafloor that could provide oxygen. The abundance of food and favorable environmental conditions meant that animals could take more evolutionary risks to stay ahead of their competition, Mussini said. 'In a more resource-starved environment, animals can't afford to make that sort of physiological investment,' Mussini said in a news release from the University of Cambridge. 'It's got certain parallels with economics: invest and take risks in times of abundance; save and be conservative in times of scarcity.' Many soft-bodied fossil finds before this one have come from regions with harsh environments such as Canada's Burgess Shale formation and China's Maotianshan Shales, noted Susannah Porter, a professor of Earth science at the University of California in Santa Barbara who was not involved in the study. 'It's not unlike if paleontologists far in the future only had great fossil records from Antarctica, where harsh cold environments forced people to adapt. … But then found great human fossils in New York City, where people flourished,' Porter explained. 'We have an opportunity to see different sorts of evolutionary pressures that aren't like, it's really cold, it's really hot, there's not a lot of water.' While some of the feeding mechanisms uncovered in the Grand Canyon fossils are still around today, others are much more alien. Among the most freakish: penis worms that turned their mouths inside out, revealing a throat lined with hairy teeth. The worms, also known as cactus worms, are mostly extinct today, but were widespread during the Cambrian. The fossilized worm found in the Grand Canyon represents a previously unknown species. Due to its relatively large size — about 3.9 inches (10 centimeters) — and distinct teeth, it was named Kraytdraco spectatus, after the fictional krayt dragon from the Star Wars universe, Mussini said. This particular penis worm appears to have had a gradient of hundreds of branching teeth used to sweep food into their extendable mouths. 'It's a bit hard to understand how exactly it was feeding,' Mussini said. 'But it was probably eating debris on the seafloor, scraping it away with some of the most robust teeth that it had, and then using these other, more delicate teeth to filter and retain it within this long, tube-like mouth.' Rows of tiny molars, sternal parts and comblike limbs that once belonged to crustaceans were also among the findings, which all date back 507 million to 502 million years. Similar to today's brine shrimp, the crustaceans used these fine-haired limbs to capture floating food from the water and bring it to the mouth, where molars would then grind down the particles, Mussini explained. Nestled among the molars, researchers even found a few unlucky plankton. Other creatures resembling their modern counterparts included sluglike mollusks. The fossils revealed chains of teeth that likely helped them scrape algae or bacteria from along the seafloor. 'For each of these animals, there's different components, but most of what we found directly relates to the way these animals were processing their food, which is one of the most exciting parts, because it tells us a lot about their lifestyle, and as a consequence, their ecological implications,' Mussini said. Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.