Volcanic Activity on Venus: How Long Must We Look to Find a Smoking Gun?

Abstract

While volcanic landforms attest to the numerous and varied volcanic processes on Venus, estimates of the frequency of volcanic eruptions are lacking. Constraints from volcanic resurfacing volumes can be equally satisfied by infrequent large eruptions or numerous smaller events. Recently, Byrne and Krishnamoorthy (2022), https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JE007040, used the 40-year period from 1980 to 2020 from the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program (GVP) database (Global Volcanism Program, 2013) to extrapolate the frequency of volcanic events on Earth to Venus. They evaluated the tectonic settings from the GVP database and provided estimates that consider the differences in those settings between Earth and Venus. Byrne and Krishnamoorthy extrapolated the rate of volcanism between Earth and Venus using the mass/volume ratios, freeing their results from the uncertain tectonic evolution of Venus. The assumption that Venus is in a stagnant-lid tectonic regime with a straight-forward geodynamic evolution has been challenged by Weller and Kiefer (2020), https://doi.org/10.1029/2019je005960, who showed that a planetary surface may reflect different styles of convection with highly active and sluggish and inactive regions occurring at the same time. The straight-forward scaling allowed Byrne and Krishnamoorthy to estimate that as many as 120 eruptions might take place on Venus every year, a frequency that should be detectable by upcoming Venus missions.