Climate Change Turns Venus Into Hell Planet, Earth Can Do It Too


 Long ago, Venus was a planet with a rocky surface and a liquid core. This planet stores water, perhaps even hospitable to life. But extreme climate change later turned it into the hell as we know it today. Earth will be like that too?

In its development, Venus becomes hotter and hotter. The atmosphere is filled with heat-trapping gases. Water evaporates into the atmosphere, then disappears into space.


Whatever mechanism the planet has to balance its climate has been broken. Nothing, not even a robot, can survive there.



"Human-caused climate change can never be that bad," said Giada Arney, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.


However, the story of Venus' transformation from a potentially Earth-like planet holds important lessons for those of us on Earth, who are currently navigating a warming world.


For the past 4.6 billion years, Earth has kept its climate in balance through a process known as the carbon cycle. Over time, most of the carbon in the atmosphere is taken up by the oceans, where it is locked into rock in the form of calcium carbonate, or limestone.


The movement of tectonic plates pulls the rock into the Earth's interior, where carbon can be stored for thousands of years before being released back into the atmosphere by volcanoes.


The carbon cycle becomes Earth's thermostat, as it keeps temperatures from swinging too far in extreme directions. When a volcano is very active, carbon builds up in the atmosphere, trapping heat as happens in the greenhouse effect.


However, rising temperatures can cause more rain to erode the rock, which releases the material to make calcium carbonate and locks the carbon in the form of shells, limestone and other rocks and cools it back down.


When Venus becomes hell

Scientists suspect that Venus once had its own thermostat. The spacecraft sent to investigate the atmosphere of Earth's twin planet found the remains of water molecules.


This is proof that at one point, the planet was able to keep its temperature under control. But when the planet gets too hot, the water evaporates and forms clouds in the atmosphere that reflect sunlight back into space. If the planet had plate tectonics, as some researchers think, that system would help modulate carbon.



But the Sun, like all yellow dwarfs, grows brighter with age. This gradual enlightenment is too slow to explain the climate changes Earth has experienced in the last century, but it has made radiation from the Sun about 40% more intense than it was 4 billion years ago.


At some point, perhaps half a billion years ago, Venus could no longer handle the heat. The cloud becomes too thick and begins to capture more radiation than is reflected. Conditions become so warm that all the water on the planet turns into steam, which is then broken down by solar radiation.


The loss of water may also have disrupted the tectonics of Venus (if any), as water is considered an important "lubricant" for shifting tectonic plates. Without this recycling mechanism, carbon in the atmosphere accumulates to an extreme.


"At that point the game is over. The planet has no way of escaping the heat energy from the star," said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University.


Now Venus is an example of the runaway greenhouse effect, a testament to how a planet can change when the cycle that balances its climate is broken.


The temperature on its surface is more than 450 degrees Celsius. The crushing pressure of an atmosphere thick with sulfuric acid clouds is as intense as we would experience if we were half a mile beneath Earth's oceans. If that wasn't enough to kill you, another picture would be if we breathe air that is made up of 96% carbon dioxide.


"The gradual brightening of the Sun that turned Venus so hot it could one day happen to Earth, at least in the next few billion years," Arney said.


Therefore, climate change requires urgent attention. Just as a warming Sun destroys Venus' temperature control system, humans have disrupted Earth's natural cycles by burning fossil fuels.


Buried carbon from ancient organisms that should have remained locked beneath the Earth's surface is now being released 60 times faster than natural processes.


We really won't see our planet becoming like Venus anytime soon. But climate change has been in the spotlight in the last decade to prevent the worst-case scenario on our Earth.


"The planetary system is kept in very fine balance. It's important for humans to realize that it doesn't take much to change the balance and it does change things fundamentally," Byrne said.

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