Climate Change on Venus

Contact: David Grinspoon 303-546-6863

The surface of Venus is largely covered with volcanic plains which seem to have erupted rather suddenly over much of the planet about 500 to 700 million years ago. Recently published models by SwRI scientists (Mark Bullock and David Grinspoon, The Recent Evolution of Climate on Venus, Icarus, 150, 19-37, 2001) show that this massive outpouring of volcanic lava would have changed the composition of the atmosphere, adding greenhouse gasses and altering the clouds. The resulting climate changes would have been extreme, perhaps altering the surface temperature by as much as 100 Kelvins. This may explain how large areas of the surface became faulted simultaneously at widespread areas around the planet. Ridges, such as those seen in this Magellan image, could have formed when the surface buckled under a sudden impulse of heat from the volcanically induced mega-greenhouse effect.

Full article: http://boulder.swri.edu/~bullock/vclime.pdf