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Dry late accretion inferred from Venus’s coupled atmosphere and internal evolution

Nature Geoscience volume 13, pages 265–269 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

It remains contentious whether the meteoritic material delivered to the terrestrial planets after the end of core formation was rich or poor in water and other volatiles. As Venus’s atmosphere has probably experienced less volatile recycling over its history than Earth’s, it may be possible to constrain the volatile delivery to the primitive Venusian atmosphere from the planet’s present-day atmospheric composition. Here we investigate the long-term evolution of Venus using self-consistent numerical simulations of global thermochemical mantle convection coupled with both an atmospheric evolution model and a late accretion N-body delivery model. We found that atmospheric escape is only able to remove a limited amount of water over the history of the planet, and that the late accretion of wet material exceeds this sink and would result in a present-day atmosphere that is too rich in volatiles. A preferentially dry composition of the late accretion impactors is most consistent with measurements of atmospheric H2O, CO2 and N2. Hence, we suggest that the late accreted material delivered to Venus was mostly dry enstatite chondrite, consistent with isotopic data for Earth, with less than 2.5% (by mass) wet carbonaceous chondrites. In this scenario, the majority of Venus’s and Earth’s water would have been delivered during the main accretion phase.

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Fig. 1: Volatile exchanges on Venus.
Fig. 2: LA scenarios.
Fig. 3: Evolution of water in the atmosphere of Venus.
Fig. 4: Consequences of LA volatile content on present-day Venus atmosphere.

Data availability

The data that support the findings reported in this article are available as follows: code outputs of N-body simulations (impactors and collisions parameters) are available from figshare, with the identifier https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11829621. Data generated for the models displayed in the figures (equivalent pressure evolutions) are available from figshare, with the identifier https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11829621. Datasets generated during the current study as the present-day Venus atmosphere composition for the full complement of models are available in Supplementary Information.

Code availability

The convection code StagYY is the property of P.J.T. and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich. It is available on request from P.J.T. (paul.tackley@erdw.ethz.ch). The N-body model MERCURY, used for the LA scenarios, is available at https://github.com/4xxi/mercury.

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Acknowledgements

We thank F. Crameri for providing the perceptually uniform colour map used in Fig. 451. We thank D. Rubie for his comments. We also thank R. Brasser and K. Zahnle. C.G., V. Dehant and V. Debaille were supported by BELSPO PlanetTOPERS IUAP programme and ET-HoME Excellence of Science programme. V. Debaille thanks the FRS-FNRS and ERC StG ISoSyC FP7/336718. M.S. acknowledges the National Center for Competence in Research ‘PlanetS’ supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). V. Dehant was financially supported by the Belgian PRODEX program managed by the European Space Agency in collaboration with the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire G-Time, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    C. Gillmann & V. Debaille

  2. Bayerisches Geoinstitut, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    G. J. Golabek

  3. Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, CNRS and Université de Bordeaux, Pessac, France

    S. N. Raymond

  4. Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    M. Schönbächler & P. J. Tackley

  5. Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    V. Dehant

  6. Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium

    V. Dehant

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Contributions

C.G. wrote the atmosphere, outgassing and escape codes, and designed the coupling between models. C.G. and G.J.G. wrote the impact code. P.J.T. wrote the StagYY code. S.N.R. designed the N-body models and designed related simulations. C.G. and G.J.G. designed the set of StagYY simulations. C.G. ran all the simulations. All the authors discussed the results and contributed to the manuscript.

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Correspondence to C. Gillmann.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Evolution of CO2 and N2 pressure.

Time evolution of a, CO2 and b, N2 abundances in the Venus atmosphere for three different LA compositions, labelled as CC material percentage of the total LA mass delivery. MAX parameters and LA scenario D starting at 100 Myr after CAI formation are used.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Evolution of water in the atmosphere of Venus.

Time evolution of H2O in the Venus atmosphere for MED conditions assuming different LA compositions, labelled as CC material percentage of the total LA mass delivery. LA scenario D starting at 100 Myr after CAI formation is used.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Evolution of water in the atmosphere of Venus.

Time evolution of H2O in the Venus atmosphere for MIN conditions assuming different LA compositions, labelled as CC material percentage of the total LA mass delivery. LA scenario D starting at 100 Myr after CAI formation is used.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Comparison of delivery mechanisms.

Volcanic and impact sources for a, H20 and b, CO2. All shown cases employ MAX parameters and LA scenario D starting at 100 Myr after CAIs.

Extended Data Fig. 5

List of parameters and values.

Extended Data Fig. 6

MAX, MED and MIN specific parameter sets.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Fig. 1 and Annex 1 (methods).

Supplementary Table 1

List of models and model outcomes after 4.5 Gyr of evolution.

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Gillmann, C., Golabek, G.J., Raymond, S.N. et al. Dry late accretion inferred from Venus’s coupled atmosphere and internal evolution. Nat. Geosci. 13, 265–269 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-0561-x

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