Seismic Velocities in the Interior of Venus: Estimates from Global Geodynamic Models

Kurzfassung

Similar to the Earth in size, mass and potentially also the composition, Venus is often referred to as our sister planet. However, today’s Venus represents one of the most extreme places in the Solar System. It possesses a dense CO2 atmosphere with a surface pressure 90 times higher than the Earth and surface temperatures able to melt lead. Its young surface is dominated by volcanic features at all spatial scales (Hahn & Byrne, 2023), and recent reanalysis of Magellan radar data suggests that Venus might be volcanically active today (Herrick & Hensley, 2023; Sulcanese et al., 2024). Venus also possesses a large variety of tectonic features at its surface, ranging from rift zones of thousands of kilometers in length (Foster and Nimmo, 1996), to wide-spread distribution of wrinkle ridges (Billoti and Suppe, 1999), and a substantial number of round formations consisting of a ring wall and radial cracks and fractures in the interior (the so-called coronae), some of which have been associated with regional subduction processes (Davaille et al., 2017). These tectonic structures and the growing evidence for a geologically active Venus at present day point toward a potentially seismically active planet.