NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - For half a century, scientists have dreamed of spying erupting volcanoes on Venus. This unfathomably hot world is obfuscated by noxious clouds, but past missions have revealed the surface is covered in volcanic features. And now, thanks to the recorded memories of a long-dead spacecraft, scientists have struck scientific gold: They’ve seen a vent on Venus change shape, expand, and appear to overflow with molten rock.
“My bet is there was an eruption of a lava lake,” says Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and one of the new study’s two co-authors.
As reported today in the in the journal Science, Herrick and a colleague spotted the volcanic maw—on the side of the colossal volcano Maat Mons—in radar images taken by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in 1991.
“This is one of the most convincing pieces of evidence we’ve seen,” says Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved with the work.