The old idea that Venus might possess surface conditions to those of an overcast earth has been thoroughly refuted by space-age measurements. Instead, the two planets may have started out similar, but diverged because of the greater solar flux at Venus. This cannot be proved, but is consistent with everything known. A runaway greenhouse effect could have evaporated an 'ocean'. The hydrogen would escape, and most of the oxygen would be incorporated into the crust. Without liquid water, CO2 would remain in the atmosphere. Chlorine atoms would catalyze the recombination of any free oxygen back to CO2. The same theories apply to the future of the earth, and to the explanation of the polar ozone holes; the analogies are striking. There is no likelihood that the earth will actually come to resemble Venus, but Venus serves both as a warning that major environmental effects can flow from seemingly small causes, and as a testbed for the predictive models of the earth.


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    Titel :

    Venus - Lessons for earth


    Beteiligte:
    Hunten, D. M. (Autor:in)

    Erschienen in:

    Erscheinungsdatum :

    1992-09-01



    Medientyp :

    Sonstige


    Format :

    Keine Angabe


    Sprache :

    Englisch




    Venus: Lessons for Earth

    Hunten, D.M. | Elsevier | 1992



    EARTH - VENUS TRAJECTORIES, 1964

    Bollman, W. E. / Clarke, V. C., Jr. / Hamilton, T. W. et al. | NTRS | 1963


    Earth-Venus trajectories, 1973

    Feitis, P. | NTRS | 1967


    Computation of Optimal Earth-Mars and Earth-Venus Trajectories

    Powers, William F. / Yoshimura, Shoichi | IEEE | 1977