THE cracks on the surface of Venus are the hallmarks of climate change, says
Pierre Moreels at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The hexagonal patterns of cracks on Venus’s surface have puzzled scientists
since 1990. Many thought lava flows had created the cracks by alternately
heating and cooling the basalt-like rock, a process that happens on Earth. But
when Moreels ran the pattern through a computer program, he found it repeats on
a scale of kilometres rather than centimetres, suggesting the cracks were caused
by huge swings in temperature.
“These cracks trace out the climate history,” he says. “It’s very different…
