Mysteries of Venus Part II

"Venus was born with the same sorts of constituents as Earth, which means there was some water in the environment. Some more probably came in from comets," Andrew Coates explains.

Any water that was there has boiled away. Due to greenhouse warming Venus becomes one of the most barren places in the whole Solar System.

Magellan mission proved also that Venus has a very unusual geological structure. Bright highlands which reflects radar beams better than lower areas. Several theories have been made explaining that uncommon structure. All of them contain explanations showing layers formed by loose soil and kind of a “metallic snow”.

Second exploration proved that Venus's hot lower areas contains many vaporized metals creating dense metallic mist. At higher layers, where temperature is lower, they are condensing to form a reflective surface on the ground.

That observation fully explains what the snow is created from. As candidates tellurium and iron pyrites (also known as “Fool’s Gold) were proposed as most likely ingredients.

The last recent work made by Washington University Team suggests the metallic cover could be rather made from sulphides of lead or even bismuth.

“Acid rain”

An Oxford scientists believe the greenhouse effect on Venus has been created by volcanism. Active volcanoes pumped enormous quantities of the carbon dioxide (CO2) gas directly into the atmosphere. Water has vanished from the surface mixed with the eruption gases and CO2 to create a bubble trap exposed for a solar radiation and overheated the planet. Then water was split by Sunlight into its constituents: oxygen and hydrogen.

Opposite to Earth, Venus isn’t protected by any magnetic field, so components can be just pumped out from the top of the atmosphere. This fact let the light hydrogen to escape from the planet, leaving its heavier form in place - deuterium.

"On Earth, the amount of carbon dioxide is controlled because it dissolves in the surface water, that's why you get deposition on the ocean floor of carbonates," says Dr Coates. "On Venus, there was no surface water and no natural 'sink' for CO2."

For now, atmosphere on Venus contains almost 97% of carbon dioxide with clouds formed by droplets of sulphuric acid, compounds of fluorine and chlorine.

These of them take a part in the acid rain named ‘virga’ which vanishes just before reaching the Venus’ surface.

Clouds formed in the upper part of atmosphere spin with a rate of 300km/h, driven by extremely strong winds.

The same as the Earth Venus rotates in an East to West (retrograde), making one full rotation by 243 Earth days.

This is quite unseen - especially its orbital path around the Sun lasts 225 Earth days.

If we put a person on the Venus’ surface, we would get the feeling that the days were longer than the one year.

Please focus on those movies. I know it is time-consuming but…interesting. Divided in 3 parts the movie contains everything that the scientist has already discovered.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

A peaceful Venus

It’s hard to tell for scientists how long present-day condition has existed on present Venus.

There are many theories but one of them said, ‘the current surface temperature might be stabilized through a complex interaction between the atmosphere and minerals in the rocks.’ But this statement needs a lot of the surface has to be in a close contact with the atmosphere.

If we discredit that idea for a moment and one assumes that the greenhouse warming is driven by volcanism, then conditions could be fluctuating on an approximate short timescale.

"At some point the volcanism will run out. It ran out on Mars a long time ago, and it has partially run out on Earth," says Fred Taylor.

"The volcanism will eventually subside to the point where it can't maintain these high temperatures and pressures. It's interesting to ask yourself what will happen then."

Recent atmospheric studies assume that dire and strict conditions on Venus will evaluate and they finally become more relax and stable… and the planet will become more like Earth.

"You might get the oceans back, if there's enough water vapour to condense. And once you get the oceans back, they hasten the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere because they dissolve it and turn it into rocks," said Professor Taylor.

"You might end up with a Venus that's quite a lot like people thought it was going to be in the 1950s."

Questions:

1) According to the scientist’s discoveries can we say that suddenly Venus could be a human friendly planet?

2) Today we are at the very beginning of the Universe exploration and we’ve found so far few almost Earth-like objects. Do you belief that somewhere over there is a similar planet colonized by identical forms of life? That, unexpectedly, we have our counterparts there?