00:03Despite being a veritable hellscape featuring the hottest temperatures in our solar system and an atmosphere that's poisonous to humans,
00:10Venus is actually the most Earth-like planet we know of.
00:13But there has always been one big difference.
00:15Experts don't believe that Venus has plate tectonics.
00:17And while that's still technically the case, they are adding an addition.
00:20Venus might have a squishy outer crust or lithosphere as well.
00:24Looking at old data from the Magellan orbiter,
00:26scientists now say that our yellow neighbor likely has a much thinner crust than previously calculated.
00:31After examining these images closer, they realized that what they initially thought were impact craters are actually coronae,
00:37rings of crust that are pushed up by massive amounts of molten rock underneath,
00:40until they dome and eventually collapse in on themselves.
00:43This sort of turned a lot of what experts thought they knew about Venus on its head,
00:46as they didn't believe it was all that active.
00:48However, some 80% of the planet's surface is covered in volcanic rock,
00:52and it had to be coming from somewhere.
00:53And it turns out it could be from an ever-shifting surface caused by subterranean bubbling.
00:58With the researchers writing, quote,
00:59While Venus doesn't have Earth-style tectonics,
01:02these regions of thin lithosphere appear to be allowing significant amounts of heat to escape,
01:06similar to areas where new tectonic plates form on Earth's seafloor.
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