Active volcanoes on Venus, heat gets out how?

Michele dropped a link on Suggestions, here is the story

After the end of the ESA Venus mission rapidly changing hotspots are found in IR images, after earlier noticing large changes in Sulpur levels.Why now?

I’m not keen on ESA PR, doesn’t even link the GRL paper so I’ll add a good blog link afterwards.

Title Brightness changes in Ganiki Chasma
Released 18/06/2015 2:00 pm
Copyright From E. Shalygin et al (2015)

18 June 2015

ESA’s Venus Express has found the best evidence yet for active volcanism on Earth’s neighbour planet.

Seeing the planet’s surface is extremely difficult due to its thick atmosphere, but radar observations by previous missions to Venus have revealed it as a world covered in volcanoes and ancient lava flows.

Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth and has a similar bulk composition, so is likely to have an internal heat source, perhaps due to radioactive heating. This heat has to escape somehow, and one possibility is that it does so in the form of volcanic eruptions.

Some models of planetary evolution suggest that Venus was resurfaced in a cataclysmic flood of lava around half a billion years ago. But whether Venus is active today has remained a hot topic in planetary science.
— ESA

Transient hot spots on Venus: Best evidence yet for active volcanism

Posted By Emily Lakdawalla

2015/06/18 23:42 UTC

Topics: pretty pictures, Venus missions before 2000, Venus Express, Venus, geology, explaining science

In a paper released in Geophysical Research Letters today, Eugene Shalygin and coauthors have announced the best evidence yet for current, active volcanism on Venus. The evidence comes from the Venus Monitoring Camera, which saw transient hot spots in four locations along a system of rifts near Venus’ equator. They saw the hot spots in two distinct episodes in 2008 and 2009.

The press release describes the science pretty well, so I won’t belabor that here; I thought I’d show you some pretty pictures of the region, made from Magellan data. Magellan obtained radar images of more than 97% of the planet, which have been merged into several enormous global data sets. To get the best-quality Magellan data you have to interact with an extremely klunky interface through the USGS, but it’s well worth the effort. Here is the region in which Shalygin et al. report observing the hot spots.

— The Planetary Society

So this is what runaway AGW looks like. Anything to add ESA? Or the other lot? No?

The Soviets getting down more than once, with a camera, still rankles others as does relying on Russian supplied heavy lift engines. We are fortunate they did get there, drew a line in the sand dulling fictional imagination through clouds, remote sensing.

A question now is by how much do active volcanoes, probably very large, change what is supposed to be known about the Venus conditions?

Post by Tim