Ancient Venus may have had oceans until 2.9 billion years ago

On Sunday, February 14th, 2016 at 11:30 am, Nitrocosm said:

The thing is, we do not really know what happened on Venus since then. Just because the oceans disappeared and the surface became extremely hot doesn't mean geological activity ended. In fact, there's evidence that something catastrophic may have happened at some point: based on the distribution of impact craters on Venus, it seems that the entire current crust is of a similar age (several hundred million years). In contrast, there are parts of Earth's crust (the old nuclei of continents - or cratons - that are several billion years old) where the impact craters are concentrated. As the oceanic crust gets completely recycled regularly, there's far fewer craters found there. The fact that Venus' surface seems to be of roughly similar age would suggest that there was some kind of global, catastrophic event (perhaps analoguous to the so-called 'flood basalt' events that occured in Earth's history, but on a much larger scale! ) that reshaped the entire surface.

I would imagine the Venusian atmosphere alone, with its wind currents and greater density, would re-shape the surface quite often. Wind erosion should be much more severe on Venus.

And yes, Venus is still possibly geologically active - volcanic activity is known to have happened as recently as a few hundred years ago. I'm not sure what level of detail exists for Venus's geology but around 3 million years ago we're pretty sure there were active volcanoes so Venus must have a liquid mantle and plate tectonics.

We have a relatively good picture of the surface of Venus thanks to radar imaging (I'm fascinated by using radio frequencies to take photographs). It's obvious to all of us that because of the thick sulfur dioxide clouds, the surface isn't viewable with visible light.

On a side note, looking at Venus and Jupiter is a lot of fun with a simple back yard telescope during the summer.