Hell planet has strange volcanoes shaped over 'hundreds of thousands of years'

Venus, a hell planet, is home to some strange structures and activities. The extremely hot planet has several volcanoes which are unlike any seen in the solar system. Instead of having a typical triangular shape that tapers towards the top, volcanoes on Venus have a flat top dome that looks like pancakes.

The circular shape of the Venusian volcanoes has long been suspected to be the result of thick, slow-moving lava. However, the planet itself is to blame for the strange formations.

Scientists have discovered that Venus has a bendy crust, which plays a crucial role in shaping the volcanoes and their circular domes. The research was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

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An anomaly on Venus

The geological anomaly was troubling scientists who were trying to understand how Venus' volcanoes came to take such a shape. For this, they focused their attention on the volcanic dome Narina Tholus, a 145-kilometre-wide structure on Venus.

NASA's Magellan mission collected radar data about Venus in the 1990s. The researchers used it to create a model of the dome. They then tested how lava flow could have shaped it. The scientists dove into it in two ways - how the lava contributed to it, and also how Venus' crust aided it.

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They discovered that lava flow alone did not facilitate the creation of flat-top domes. "Our models show that flexure influences dome shape. In the presence of more flexure, dome tops become flatter and sides steeper."

The authors noted that thick lava can deform Venus's crust. When they created the scene of lava flowing over a bendy lithosphere in the lab, they noted that after one point, the molten rock stopped spreading out. Instead, it piled up and formed flat tops with steep sides. This is exactly what they think happened with the pancake domes on Venus.

Further, Live Science reported that the process involved extremely dense lava, one that would take "hundreds of thousands of Earth-years” to create these mammoth structures on the planet.

Venus probes VERITAS and DAVINCI

The researchers are hoping to gather more data with NASA's upcoming missions to Venus - Veritas and DAVINCI. They will be the first probes to visit Venus in over 35 years. While VERITAS will look at clues to solve the mystery of Venus and Earth going their separate ways, DAVINCI will peer into the planet, from the very top to the surface. However, neither of them is scheduled to take off before 2031, as per NASA.