Venus may have had seas of carbon dioxide

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

While Earth has seas filled with water, recently published research has found the landscape of its twin planet, Venus, may have been shaped by unusual oceans of carbon dioxide.

While they are called twin planets because they have similar size, mass and chemical makeup, Earth and Venus are vastly different in other ways, Mashable reported on Tuesday. While the conditions here on Earth are suitable for life, Venus features a “crushing” atmosphere, clouds filled with “corrosive sulfuric acid” and “a rocky desert surface hot enough to melt lead.”

Despite the “unbearably hot and dry” conditions currently found on Venus, however, previous research had indicated that it once possessed enough atmospheric water to cover the surface of the entire planet in an ocean approximately 80 feet (25 meters) deep. However, it likely that the planet was too hot for precipitation to occur, even if there was enough moisture in the air.

Writing in an August edition of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, Dima Bolmatov, a theoretical physicist at Cornell University, and his colleagues suggest that the planet could once have been home to oceans filled with CO2, not H2O. After all, he explained, carbon dioxide is common on Venus, comprising an estimated 96.5 percent of its current atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases linked to warming climate here on Earth, can exist not only as a solid, a liquid and a gas, but also in what is known as a “supercritical” state when it is pushed beyond a specific point of combined pressure and temperature.

It has properties of both liquids and gases in this state. dissolving materials like the former but flowing like the latter. To investigate the potential impact that supercritical CO2 might have on Venus, the study authors first analyzed the unique properties of supercritical matter.

While they believed that the physical properties of supercritical fluids changed gradually with pressure and temperature, computer simulations of told a different story – they indicated that supercritical matter could shift dramatically from gas-like properties to liquid-like ones.

Currently, the atmospheric pressure of Venus at the surface is over 90 times that found on Earth, but during the planet’s earliest days, that pressure may have been far greater, Bolmatov and his fellow investigators said. If those conditions lasted for at least 100 million years, they might have led to the formation of supercritical CO2 with liquid-like properties.

As a result, Bolmatov said that it is “plausible” that geological features such as rift valleys, river-like beds and plains on Venus are “the fingerprints of near-surface activity of liquid-like supercritical carbon dioxide.” Furthermore, they found that, depending on the pressure and temperature, gas-like supercritical CO2 clusters resembling soap bubbles may also have formed.

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