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Planetary science

Estranged planetary twins

Nature Geoscience volume 16, pages 2–3 (2023)Cite this article

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Venus and Earth have remarkably different surface conditions, yet the lithospheric thickness and heat flow on Venus may be Earth-like. This finding supports a tectonic regime with limited surface mobility and dominated by intrusive magmatism.

Venus is often called Earth’s twin. These neighbouring planets have similar sizes and compositions, and should have been formed in a similar way. Hence, we could expect their subsequent evolution and present-day state to be alike. This is not the case: in fact, their surface conditions are extraordinarily different. While Earth has surface conditions that allow life, Venus has a mean surface temperature of around 737 K (464°C, 867°F) and an average surface pressure of about 92 times that at Earth’s surface1. This means that Earth and Venus must have evolved differently over the past 4.5 billion years. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Smrekar and colleagues2 find that, despite other differences in present-day state, the heat flow and the thickness of the lithosphere (the crust and uppermost mantle) of Venus are comparable to those of Earth, constraining its evolution and interior dynamics.

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Fig. 1: Schematic illustrations of some of the global tectonic regimes proposed for Venus.

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  1. Institute of Geophysics, Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Diogo L. Lourenço

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  1. Diogo L. Lourenço
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Correspondence to Diogo L. Lourenço.

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Lourenço, D.L. Estranged planetary twins. Nat. Geosci. 16, 2–3 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01104-z

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