""Earth lava tubes have smaller volumes, Mars tubes have slightly bigger volumes, and then the Moon'stubes have even bigger volumes," said University of Padova researcher Barbara De Toffoli during the Europlanet Science Congress in Finland earlier this month, as quoted by New Scientist. "And then there's Venus, completely disrupting this trend, displaying very, very big tube volumes.""
"Now, as detailed in a new paper, De Toffoli and her colleagues presented the "first compelling evidence for the existence of lava tubes on Venus." They found that they were not only arranged near large volcanoes, but that the pits "also develop in a direction consistent with the slope of the terrain on which they were observed, thus consistent with the hypothesis"
Venus hosts extensive lava tubes whose volumes are unexpectedly large and more similar to lunar lava tubes than terrestrial ones despite Venus's mass and gravity being closer to Earth's. Typical trends link larger lava tubes with lower gravity, but Venusian tubes violate this pattern, implying additional controlling factors. Large pits and holes on the surface occur near major volcanoes and align with local slopes, consistent with lava flow and tube formation. The distribution and scale of these features provide strong geologic evidence for lava tubes on Venus and inform comparative planetary volcanology.
Read at Futurism
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