Earth may have had a lucky escape from the volcanism that transformed Venus.
that Venus wasn't always this way, and could have once been a temperate world somewhat similar to Earth — perhaps more recently, in geological terms, than expected.Michael Way, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, has led much of the research developing this new vision of Venus.
"While we're not yet sure how often the events which created these fields occurred, we should be able to narrow it down by studying Earth's own history," Way said in aThe frequency with which massive volcanic events forming large igneous provinces have occurred on Earth implies that it is likely that several such events could have occurred on Venus within a million years. These incidents could have scarred Venus forever.
Earth itself has had some close calls. So-called"super-volcanoes" have been connected to numerous mass-extinction events on Earth over the past half-a-billion years. For example, the Late Devonian era mass extinction 370 million years ago has been attributed by some to super-volcanism in what is now Russia and Siberia, as well as to a separate super-volcanic eruption in Australia.
For unknown reasons, similar volcanic events on Venus were much more widespread and instigated a runaway greenhouse effect that transformed the planet. Meanwhile on Earth, the carbon-silicate cycle that acts as the planet's natural thermostat, exchanging carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases between the mantle and the atmosphere over millions of years, was able to prevent Earth from following the same path as Venus.
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