Volcanic double-whammy says Venus still spews

NewScientist ^ | 09 April 2010 | by Jeff Hecht

[Fred Nerks]

Venus's namesake may be the goddess of love, but the planet looks more angry than passionate. Two studies that reveal recently solidified lava and what appears to be the largest volcano in the solar system raise the possibility that huge fiery outpourings could still happen there today.

Many planetary scientists had thought Venus was geologically dead, making the Earth the only rocky planet with active volcanism.

Suzanne Smrekar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and her colleagues have found signs of relatively recent volcanism by measuring the infrared "glow" of solidified lava.

Hot rocks Since the Venusian surface is nearly 480 °C, it emits infrared radiation. Older volcanic rocks tend to emit less infrared, say the researchers, because carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide in the planet's atmosphere weather the rocks and change their composition.

Smrekar and colleagues used an instrument on the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft, which is in orbit around Venus, to monitor infrared radiation at a specific wavelength that penetrates the planet's perpetual cloud cover.

They targeted three areas in Venus's southern hemisphere that radar and gravity observations by NASA's Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s suggested are "hotspot" volcanic deposits, like Hawaii: the Imdr, Themis and Dione regiones. They found all three areas are especially "bright" at the infrared wavelength that their instrument could see, which means the rocks there formed more recently.

In the act Pinning down the exact age of the rocks is tricky, though. It is not clear how quickly the surface is weathered by the atmosphere of Venus. They are no more than 2.5 million years old, Smrekar says, but they could be as young as mere hundreds of years...

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1186785 (Smrekar et al); Geology, in press (Hansen et al)

[Fred Nerks]

Video: Infrared emissions from the volcanic peak Idunn Mons in the southern hemisphere of Venus reveal recently solidified lava (Video: Ryan Ollerenshaw/Eric DeJong)

Video link at website.

Venus volcanoes could erupt today (Image: Jet Propulsion Lab/NASA)

[valkyry1]

Many planetary scientists had thought Venus was geologically dead

I predict they will come up with every reason for this false hypothesis except the one that says Venus is younger than they thought.

[HiTech RedNeck]

she’s got it
oh baby she’s got it

(if nobody can see the surface of venus, how could anyone state whether or not venusian magma is still breaking through its surface?)

[Riley]

Thermal imaging- using the same principle that an Apache uses to find a-holes planting IEDs in Iraq at night. The surface of Venus is hot- but Magma is hotter.

I still get a kick out of the images of the surface of Venus that the Soviet lander sent back in the Seventies. Might be only dust and rocks, but it’s Venus.

http://www.universetoday.com/guide-to-space/venus/landings-on-venus/

[Fred Nerks]

They should have listened to Velikovsky, he tried to tell them in Worlds in Collision that Venus was a young planet and would turn out to be hot...but Carl Sagan maintained it was NOT...had to invent the greenhouse effect as a result.

[Judith Anne]

Everyone should have listened to Velikovsky. The man was amazing; extremely well educated and an awe-inspiring original thinker.

[Fred Nerks]

http://www.archive.org/stream/earthupheaval010880mbp/earthupheaval010880mbp_djvu.txt

full text of ‘Earth in Upheaval’

Velikovsky archive link:

http://www.varchive.org/

[Fred Nerks]

Transcripts of the Morning and Evening Sessions
of the A.A.A.S. Symposium on
“Velikovsky’s Challenge to Science”
held on February 25, 1974

excerpt:

“...What Professor Sagan here said is in advance of what he will say, so I cannot judge what he would claim as wrong predictions. I had only the chance to read Newsweek magazine statement this week, in which Sagan was quoted, after his visiting Newsweek editorial staff, that Velikovsky predictions are eitgher very vague, or they are in condradiction to physical laws, or that they are not original.

I believe that he will have a hard time to prove this. Maybe we will not be able to discuss it all in the morning session. We will have the evening session; then we’ll discuss it at greater length.

But let us go to the question of the Venus clouds. I claimed about Venus number of things, and all of them went into fulfillment.

I claimed about Venus that it wold be found incandescently hot when it was thought that it is not much above the terrestrial annual mean temperature.

I claimed that Venus was disturbed in its rotation.

I claimed that Venus has a very massive atmosphere at the time when my opponent and critic, the Royal Astronomer of England, Spencer Jones, claimed that Venus has less atmosphere than Earth, and as you know now, there are about ninety, maybe ninety-five atmospheric pressure close to the ground.

Now, as to the composition of the clouds, let us say the first thing this. The question of recentness of Venus is solved by the question of the origin of Venus’ heat.

Professor Sagan clings to an unsupportable statement ath this heat could have been a result of greenhouse effect. We will discuss this. already many authorities— ...

http://www.varchive.org/lec/aaas/transcripts.htm

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Fred Nerks!

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[Avoiding_Sulla]

That is a pretty mangled transcript. It’s pretty clear Velikovsky wasn’t permitted to correct the record officially.
Do you know if he did so unofficially?

The man wrote quite well, and so I imagine he could speak quite well too. But someone unfamiliar with his work might would walk away after reading a portion of the AAAS accounting and think the man was less erudite than he was. How convenient.

[Eaker]

This statement is from your link:

All of the spacecraft that ever landed on Venus are probably still there today.

Unless they landed on the bad side of town and were chopped for parts?

[Riley]

:-)

The Venusian surface is probably an *extremely* corrosive environment. They’re probably still there in the form of slightly elevated local concentrations of Iron in the soil.

[wendy1946]

When the surface temperatures of Venus were discovered there should have been a line of scientists five miles long at Velikovsky’s door waiting to apologize. The idea that any sort of a greenhouse effect could cause 1000F temperatures on a planet where no light even gets through the cloud layers is beyond ludicrous.

[Avoiding_Sulla]

Exactly. However, Post-Normal Science was already being practiced, and no scientist who wanted to keep their job would have dared. Establishment science’s treatment of Velikovsky was way off the scale of legitimate skepticism long before a single of his predictions panned out. Anyone who has ever heard the warning “better get with the program” or something like it knows what is expected of them. Few are willing to buck the system.

[Judith Anne]

Velikovsky, if I remember correctly, had doctorates in a couple of the sciences as well as psychoanalysis. I thought his books, Earth in Upheaval, Ages in Chaos, and another..?...were beautifully written, some passages almost poetic.

[wendy1946]

You have to be outside of the system to say anything about it. These new findings however might turn out to be some sort of a final nail in the coffin of deep-time paradigms.

[Avoiding_Sulla]

and another..?

I think the one you're forgotten is Worlds in Collision. It was his premier book of his Interdisciplinary Synthesis series. It all started as a side discovery when he was researching for the book he didn't get around to publishing until 1960: Oedipus and Aknahton.

[Judith Anne]

Yes, that’s it, “Worlds in Collision.” Probably 35 years ago, I read them all. They’ve influenced my thinking ever since.

[SunkenCiv]

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