Planetary scientists Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn of the University of Washington have created a map of tens of thousands of volcanoes on Venus that could help identify where the next eruption on the planet will come from. The map was produced with data from NASA’s Magellan mission, and shows 85,000 volcanoes up to 5 kilometers in diameter.
With the discovery of evidence of active volcanism on Venus, it is important to know aspects such as where the volcanoes are concentrated, how many of them there are and how big they are. These questions are addressed in the study, so the map reveals in detail the location of volcanoes, where and how they are grouped, and how the spatial distribution compares with the geophysical properties of the planet.
“We came up with the idea of putting everything together in one global catalog because no one has done it on this scale before,” Hahn said. “It was tedious, but I had experience with ArcGIF software, which is what I used to build the map. This tool was not available when the data (from the Magellan mission) became available during the 1990s,” she said.
Although scientists already have considerable knowledge about volcanoes on Earth, much remains to be discovered about those at the bottom of the oceans. Venus, on the other hand, has no oceans, and its surface features were revealed by radar images from the Magellan mission. Although the planet has volcanoes on most of its surface, it has been discovered that there are relatively fewer of those with diameters between 20 and 100 km.
This feature may be a result of magma availability and rate of eruptions. Volcanoes with less than 5 km in diameter are the most common, and represent 99% of the data obtained. “We analyzed the distribution with different spatial techniques to find out if volcanoes are clustered around other structures on Venus or if they are in certain areas,” Hahn said.
If you were surprised by the nearly 90,000 volcanoes on Venus shown on the map, know that Hahn considers this to be a conservative number, as there could be hundreds of thousands of other geological formations with volcanic properties there; however, as they are small, they end up going unnoticed.
Byrne believes the new database will help scientists investigate new places to look for evidence of recent geological activity. “We can do this either by looking at Megallan’s data, collected decades ago, or by analyzing future data and comparing it with her data,” she concluded.
The article with the results of the study was published in the journal Journal of Geophysical Research.
Source: Journal of Geophysical Research; Via: Washington University
