Scientists share 'comprehensive' map of volcanoes on Venus—all 85,000 of them

Jessica-stormlover

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Scientists share 'comprehensive' map of volcanoes on Venus—all 85,000 of them
by Washington University in St. Louis
Intrigued by reports of recent volcanic eruptions on Venus? WashU planetary scientists Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn want you to use their new map of 85,000 volcanoes on Venus to help locate the next active lava flow. Their study was posted online ahead of print in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

"This paper provides the most comprehensive map of all volcanic edifices on Venus ever compiled," said Byrne, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. "It provides researchers with an enormously valuable database for understanding volcanism on that planet—a key planetary process, but for Venus is something about which we know very little, even though it's a world about the same size as our own."

Byrne and Hahn used radar imagery from NASA's Magellan mission to Venus to catalog volcanoes across Venus at a global scale. Their resulting database contains 85,000 volcanoes, about 99% of which are less than 3 miles (5 km) in diameter.

"Since NASA's Magellan mission in the 1990s, we've had numerous major questions about Venus' geology, including its volcanic characteristics," Byrne said.

"But with the recent discovery of active volcanism on Venus, understanding just where volcanoes are concentrated on the planet, how many there are, how big they are, etc., becomes all the more important—especially since we'll have new data for Venus in the coming years."


I can't wait until we have a better understanding how many of these are active currently. I'd imagine a lot of them because it the atmosphere is being maintained someway.
 
Scientists share 'comprehensive' map of volcanoes on Venus—all 85,000 of them
by Washington University in St. Louis



I can't wait until we have a better understanding how many of these are active currently. I'd imagine a lot of them because it the atmosphere is being maintained someway.


 

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