Eighty-five thousand volcanoes on Venus

Although relatively little is said about volcanism on Venus, compared to what is said about its dense atmosphere or its torrid temperatures, there are many, many volcanoes on Venus. Some scientists have made a catalog and a map of such volcanoes, and there are no less than 85,000 included.

The work has been carried out by Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn, both from Washington University in Saint Louis of Missouri, in the United States.

It is the most detailed map to date of all recognizable volcanoes on Venus.

Byrne and Hahn used radar images from NASA’s Magellan (Magellan) mission to Venus to catalog Venusian volcanoes on a global scale.

Of the 85,000 volcanoes, about 99 percent are less than 5 kilometers in diameter.

Since NASA’s Magellan mission in the 1990s, many questions have been debated about the geology of Venus, including its volcanoes. But with the recent discovery of active volcanism on Venus, being clear about where volcanoes are concentrated on the planet, how many there are, how big they are, etc., becomes even more important, Byrne points out, especially since many will arrive in the near future. more Venus data, collected by new space missions.

The map with the 85,000 volcanoes. (Image: Rebecca Hahn, Washington University in St. Louis)

“We came up with this idea of ​​putting together a global catalog because no one had done it before on this scale,” Hahn confesses. “It was tedious, but I had experience with the ArcGIS software, which is what I used to build the map. That tool didn’t exist when this data first became available, in the 1990s.”

And if 85,000 volcanoes on Venus sounds like a high number, Hahn says it’s actually a conservative number. She believes there are hundreds of thousands of additional volcanic features on the surface of Venus. But they are too small to be detected. A 1-kilometer-diameter volcano in the Magellan space probe data would be just 7 pixels across, too little to distinguish, Hahn explains. “But with better resolution, we might be able to resolve those structures.”

Images with that better resolution are those that will be captured in future missions to Venus in the 2030s. “NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) will send missions to Venus in the early 2030s to obtain radar images resolution of the surface,” explains Byrne. “With those images, we’ll be able to look for those smaller volcanoes that we predict are there.”

Byrne and Hahn’s work is titled “A Morphological and Spatial Analysis of Volcanoes on Venus”. And it has been published in the academic journal Journal of Geophysical Research Planets. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)