Venus' Crust Heals Too Fast For Plate Tectonics

An anonymous reader writes in with an interesting look at how important plate tectonics may be to life and why the crust on Venus works differently than it does on Earth. "Without plate tectonics, carbon would build up in the atmosphere. Venus, which does not have tectonics, shows the results: an atmosphere that is 96 percent carbon dioxide. It's toxic. Yet Venus is about the same size and composition as our planet, so why doesn't it have plate tectonics? Some researchers made a model to explore how Earth initiated plate movements, and these same researchers made one model of its neighbor for comparison. A 1.5-billion-year-old Earth and a similarly aged Venus were modeled as a hot, mushy material made of tiny particles of rock. The model uses physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale to explain how the whole planet behaves. According to David Bercovici, a geophysicist at Yale who was an author on the paper, the model also shows how plate tectonics emerged on Earth but not on her twin."

Comments

Re:Why?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you bothered to read the article (or the book I linked), you'd find out that plate tectonics is crucial in the long-term carbon cycle that snatches carbon-containing minerals and, passing through subduction zones, deposits them in the depths of the Earth. (I'm not a geologist but I also vaguely recall that the hydration of these minerals contributes to the increased levels volcanic activity near the subduction zones, by means of lowering the melting point of rocks - which is how the cycle gets closed, since this volcanic activity releases the carbon back.)

Re:this makes no sense to me.

[BitZtream]

A basic biology class will tell you that CO2 is poisonous to a great many things ... like everything that breaths oxygen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

The rest of your post could be solved if you opened any 3rd or 4th grade science book ... not sure what planet you're thinking of, but its not venus, which has both an atmosphere and a solid surface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

It makes no sense because you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.