Venus in volcanic glory
Rebecca Hahn, Washington University in St. Louis
The Venus Volcano Map is the most comprehensive record of volcanic activity on any planet, including Earth.
Unlike Earth, which has many volcanoes deep in the ocean, Venus is all rock and easy to explore. In the early 1990s, NASA’s Magellan satellite used radar to map the features of the planet’s surface and its volcanoes, but much of the data lacks computational power and cannot be processed at scale. It was difficult.
Now, Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, used this radar data and advanced mapping software to create a detailed overview of Venus’ volcanic landscape. Their map contains he 85,000 volcanoes, of which nearly 1,000 are over 5 kilometers in diameter.
This map is free to use for researchers trying to find evidence of recent volcanic activity or to understand volcanic processes on the planet.
In March, Robert Herrick and his colleagues at the University of Alaska Fairbanks provided the first definitive evidence of active volcanic activity on Venus after measuring changes in the size of volcanic vents in the Martmons volcanic system over an eight-month period. I found From Magellan radar data.
Herrick and his team found this shifting crater by manually combing through images of areas likely to contain volcanic activity. For example, by showing patterns where volcanoes are clustered together, the map could speed up that process.
Reference maps are also useful for comparing emerging data such as the European Space Agency’s EnVision and NASA’s VERITAS satellites. These expeditions will carry out high-resolution radar surveys and should be able to identify smaller volcanoes than was possible with Magellan. Some researchers estimate that there may be hundreds of thousands more volcanoes than we can see today.
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