Volcanoes on Venus May Be Erupting As We Speak

When we talk about Earth’s neighbors, Mars is the talk of the town. Everyone is dreaming of a future where humans have settled the Red Planet to uncover its vast mysteries—including ones that may lead us to confirming the existence of alien life. And so a lot of people tend to forget Earth’s other nearby neighbor, Venus—which is seemingly closer to being Earth’s twin given its size. The problem is Venus also seems like an extraterrestrial version of hell due to its ungodly surface temperatures and pressure—not to mention the clouds of sulfuric acid perpetually smothering its skies.

Nevertheless, Venus is alive, in a manner of speaking. Scientists have long thought that its insides are volcanically active—which would bolster the notion that Venus is still evolving as a planet and capable of transforming into something that may not be so hellish. The big question, however, has been whether those volcanic eruptions and lava flows are something that are happening right now, not simply within the next tens of thousands of years.

“There’s no doubt there’s going to be a volcanic eruption in Venus’s future,” Robert Herrick, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, told The Daily Beast. “But there was no certainty that was really going to happen.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.