What happened to Venus? It could have simply been a warming Sun, but new research suggests that volcanic activity may have played a role in creating a runaway greenhouse effect. The history of active Volcanism almost killed the Earth.
How often have the Earth suffered massive episodes of volcanism, and how bad did those episodes affect our planet? A team of researchers investigated the occurrence of large igneous provinces, which are huge deposits of magma-born rock scattered across the globe.
The only way to make an LIP is to rip open the Earth. This can happen when the plates are diverging. Greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere during the formation of an LIP. The formation of a single LIP lasts for around five million years, and they have devastating impacts on the climate. They have been linked to more mass extinction events than comets or asteroids.
There is an incomplete record of LIPs on the Earth. Our planet always reappears itself through plate tectonics. Even though the present surface of the Earth is 500 million years old, clever geologists have been able to find the remains of LIPs.
The research states that individual LIPs appear to be random. There is no known cause for the formation of multiple LIPs. The Earth has experienced multiple LIP formations and we still have a stable climate.
A single LIP formation can damage a climate and increase the temperature in the atmosphere. Some LIP formation events coincide with each other. The geological record shows that simultaneous LIP formation events are likely. The impact of a single one is longer than the impact of many.
Multiple simultaneous LIP formation events can destroy a planet. Too many greenhouse gases escape into the atmosphere if too many go off at once. A runaway effect can be triggered by this. The oceans begin to evaporate if the atmosphere traps too much heat. Warming the oceans further is achieved by trapping even more heat in the atmosphere. The cycle goes on and on, eventually leading to heat death in a world that's warm.
According to the research, the Earth avoided this fate by the skin of our teeth. If too many LIPs formed at the same time, our climate could have gone crazy. Maybe this is what happened to Venus. We don't know how many of the extinct volcanoes on Venus have been erased by weathering or plate tectonics.
If Venus experienced too many LIPs at the same time, it could cause a greenhouse effect that killed the world. The next step is to figure out where the tipping point is and understand how many LIPs is too much. With increased interest in Venus and space probes on the slate to explore that planet, we may have a window into the history of that planet. The history of that twisted, blasted world may be revealed by putting that all together.
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