Venus looks like Earth’s evil twin that spent too much time in a pressure cooker. Same size, roughly same mass, but somewhere along the way it turned into a 900-degree hellscape wrapped in sulfuric acid clouds. And the volcanoes? They’re everywhere.
When Your Entire Planet Becomes One Giant Lava Lamp
Magellan spacecraft mapped Venus between 1990 and 1994, and what it found was frankly absurd: more than 1,600 major volcanoes scattered across the surface, plus probably hundreds of thousands of smaller ones. That’s more volcanic real estate than any other planet in our solar system. Earth’s got maybe 1,500 active volcanoes total, and we’re the poster child for plate tectonics.
Here’s the thing—Venus doesn’t do plate tectonics.
Instead of nice, orderly slabs of crust sliding around like Earth’s geological conveyor belt, Venus appears to resurface itself catastrophically every few hundred million years. The entire crust just says “screw it” and melts down, then reforms. Evidence suggests the last time this happend was somewhere between 300 and 600 million years ago, which in geological terms is practically yesterday. Every crater on Venus is relatively young because older ones got erased in the planetary do-over.
The Volcano That Might Be Erupting Right Now While You Read This
Wait—maybe some of these volcanoes aren’t extinct after all. In 2023, scientists analyzing archival Magellan data noticed something wild: a volcanic vent called Maat Mons appeared to change shape between February and October 1991. We’re talking about a vent that doubled in size over eight months, which is exactly what you’d expect from fresh lava.
Turns out tracking active volcanism on Venus is like trying to watch paint dry through a sandstorm while wearing welding goggles.
The atmosphere is so thick and hostile that we can’t just point a telescope and watch for eruptions like we do with Earth’s volcanoes. NASA’s VERITAS mission and ESA’s EnVision, both scheduled to launch in the 2030s, will carry radar systems sophisticated enough to catch Venus in the act. Until then, we’re stuck with educated guesses and tantalizing hints.
Pancakes, Spiders, and Other Things That Shouldn’t Exist on Venus
Venus has volcanic features so bizarre they sound made up. Pancake domes—flat, circular lava structures up to 65 kilometers wide and barely a kilometer tall—dot the landscape like someone dropped geological frisbees from orbit. Then there’s the arachnoids: spiderweb-like fracture patterns surrounding volcanic vents, some stretching 200 kilometers across. Nobody’s entirely sure how they form, but the leading theory involves magma pushing up from below and cracking the surface in radial patterns.
And coronae. These are massive circular structures, sometimes 2,600 kilometers across, formed when huge blobs of magma rise toward the surface but never quite break through. The crust bulges upward, cracks, then collapses inward, leaving a moat-like depression surrounded by ridges. Earth has nothing remotely comparable at this scale.
The Atmospheric Detective Work Nobody Expected to Work
In 2008, ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft detected wildly fluctuating sulfur dioxide levels in the upper atmosphere—concentrations that spiked and then dropped by half over just a few years. Sulfur dioxide is what volcanoes burp out during eruptions, so this should have been smoking-gun evidence. Except atmospheric models suggested the variations could also come from wind patterns shuffling existing sulfur dioxide around. Classic Venus, making everything complicated.
Then in 2015, scientists found transient bright spots in the atmosphere using ground-based telescopes, possibly indicating volcanic plumes. Possibly. With Venus, certainty is a luxury we rarely afford ourselves.
Why We Care About Volcanic Hellscapes 25 Million Miles Away
Understanding Venus’s volcanic activity isn’t just cosmic voyeurism—it’s a window into planetary evolution. Earth and Venus started as geological siblings, but one became a thriving biosphere and the other became a cautionary tale about runaway greenhouse effects. Venus’s volcanoes might hold clues about how atmospheres evolve, how planets lose their water, and what happens when volcanic outgassing goes unchecked for eons.
Plus, there’s the simple fact that we still don’t fully understand how a planet without plate tectonics manages to be so volcanically hyperactive. That’s the kind of puzzle that keeps planetary scientists awake at night, assuming they’re not already haunted by visions of sulfuric acid rain and 470-degree surface temperatures.
