Venus May Have Had Oceans
Another big difference between Earth and Venus is the latter’s lack of water, an essential ingredient for the complex life we consider ourselves a part of here on the Pale Blue Dot. But that wasn’t necessarily always so. A few years back, a NASA climate model suggested that Venus could have once had vast oceans of liquid water. Those results were tempered a bit, but not overturned, by a more advanced model in 2019, as LiveScience reported. The general idea is that the planet’s oceans would have evaporated when the runaway greenhouse effect took hold. But just a month after the newer NASA model came out, another team analyzed some of the basalt rock on Venus and determined that what the NASA scientists theorized could have been water beds were actually lava lakes. So, a big difference. A proposed collaboration between the Russian space agency RosCosmos and the European Space Agency would see Venera-D, an orbiter-lander combo, look at water content on Venus shortly after 2030. Perhaps we can finally put the water question to rest.
