There\u2019s No Place Like Venus<\/p>\n
If or when Earth\u2019s large-scale subduction shuts off in about 3.5 billion years, kneecapping the planet\u2019s ability to bury carbon, Kane and his team\u2019s simulations indicate that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere will rise anywhere from 0.1 bars to 0.8 bars. (For reference, the total atmospheric pressure at sea level today is 1 bar, and roughly 0.04% of that, or 0.042 bars, comes from carbon dioxide.) Even in their best-case scenario of a 0.1-bar rise in carbon dioxide, Earth\u2019s surface temperature surpasses 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). The same happens at 0.8 bars, but far more quickly.<\/p>\n
Either way, the surface of the world becomes literally boiling hot. Earth will \u201cturn into a post-runaway greenhouse state,\u201d Kane said. \u201cThe surface temperature will be too hot for any water. It\u2019ll all boil away.\u201d Nothing sitting on the world\u2019s skin would survive.<\/p>\n
Still, Earth won\u2019t get close to the state that Venus is in today. \u201cIt\u2019d be Venus lite,\u201d Kane said.<\/p>\n
Venus has a 93-bar atmosphere consisting of 96.5% carbon dioxide. Kane and his colleagues\u2019 doomsday machine, no matter how hard they push it, cannot take Earth to those levels. \u201cI was surprised by that,\u201d he said. Because the mantle is sealed off by a stagnant lid, volcanism drops, protecting Earth from a Venus-style roasting better than he thought.<\/p>\n
Independent scientists have praised the Reuniting Twins project for challenging prior assumptions and adding significantly to the discussion about the terminal state of rocky planets.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like their idea,\u201d Way said, adding that the team\u2019s version of a future Earth \u201cdoesn\u2019t sound unreasonable.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou end up with a world that\u2019s stinkingly hot,\u201d said Byrne, the Washington University planetary scientist. But, he said, the possibility that it may not be Venusian levels of hot is intriguing.<\/p>\n
Kane\u2019s team acknowledged that their model hasn\u2019t considered LIP-style mega-eruptions, and that these events could feasibly add a bounty of trapped carbon to the atmosphere at any point in the future. Maybe Earth gets unlucky and experiences multiple, simultaneous LIP events (though this grows less likely over time, Kane said, as the mantle cools and its churning slows). If so, that scenario could push Earth to be more like Venus than the team\u2019s model suggests.<\/p>\n
Uncertainties abound. But if Kane\u2019s team is even broadly correct, it suggests that Venus has a uniquely grim history. Something \u2014 perhaps an inundation of lava \u2014 burned that planet to the bone. Earth, meanwhile, has so far been unable to bring about its own destruction. Let\u2019s hope that remains the case long into the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s No Place Like Venus If or when Earth\u2019s large-scale subduction shuts off in about 3.5 billion years,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-145492","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}