Starship Asterisk*

I think some are experiencing, well, Venereal, er, dis-ease.

bystander wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

geckzilla wrote:Strange, I couldn't find a single malformed link.

Yeah. Weird. About half the links when I first tried were broken. A kind of broken I've seen before, where they looked like a local link with a URL tacked on the end. I was wondering if the vertical scale was exaggerated, and couldn't get to the "featured image" without editing the link. Fine now, though. Must have just caught the server acting up briefly.

I fixed the links here last night after seeing Chris's first post. The APOD page source has many links preceded with a space (href=" ). Everywhere that occurred in the source, the link here was preceded with 'http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/%20'.

I updated the script to get rid of those spaces in the future. I'm sure some silly mistakes will still happen, but at least a single space will be fixed.

Astronymus wrote:Looks like rock plates wobbling above calderae. As Venus has no earthlike tectonics this may be the way für the planet to release "pressure".

Venus may be a pressure cooker. Would explain all those vapors in the atmosphere.

Yes, Venus might be a pressure cooker.

I think that whether or not Venus is a pressure cooker now, my guess is that it used to be like that in the past. Having no plate tectonics may indeed lead to the buildup of extreme stress in the crust.

I, too, think that the extremely thick greenhouse-gas atmosphere of Venus is most likely the product of massive volcanic eruptions.

Some time ago I saw a BBC documentary about huge extinction events in the Earth's past. A lot of attention was given to the catastrophe that befell the Earth about 65 million years ago, when a large space boulder hit our planet. Clear signs of that catastrophe can be found in an iridium layer in the bedrock in many places on the Earth.

Fascinatingly, though, the BBC documentary claimed that no signs of other major meteorite impacts have been found in the bedrock of the Earth, even though our planet has experienced several other extinction events. The largest known extinction event, known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which killed some 90-96% of all species of the Earth, including the highly successful trilobite, may have been caused by an extremely violent and prolonged series of volcanic eruptions on the Earth, specifically in what is now Siberia.

Volcanism may be worse on Venus than on the Earth, thereby possibly explaining not only the terrible atmosphere of Venus but also, perhaps, the cylindrical mountains.

Ann

Ann wrote:Fascinatingly, though, the BBC documentary claimed that no signs of other major meteorite impacts have been found in the bedrock of the Earth, even though our planet has experienced several other extinction events.

At least, not until last week.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Ann wrote:Fascinatingly, though, the BBC documentary claimed that no signs of other major meteorite impacts have been found in the bedrock of the Earth, even though our planet has experienced several other extinction events.

At least, not until last week.

As this study is still controversial there were already theses that a a massive impact event might trigger volcanic cataclysms. Such events in the past may not be traceable today as earth tectonic could destroy evidence through subduction of marine floor.

Astronymus wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

Ann wrote:Fascinatingly, though, the BBC documentary claimed that no signs of other major meteorite impacts have been found in the bedrock of the Earth, even though our planet has experienced several other extinction events.

At least, not until last week.

As this study is still controversial there were already theses that a a massive impact event might trigger volcanic cataclysms. Such events in the past may not be traceable today as earth tectonic could destroy evidence through subduction of marine floor.

The connection between the impact and the climate change is arguably controversial. The likelihood that the evidence indicates a major impact (which is what Ann was talking about) is not.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Astronymus wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote: At least, not until last week.

As this study is still controversial there were already theses that a a massive impact event might trigger volcanic cataclysms. Such events in the past may not be traceable today as earth tectonic could destroy evidence through subduction of marine floor.

The connection between the impact and the climate change is arguably controversial. The likelihood that the evidence indicates a major impact (which is what Ann was talking about) is not.

That's what I meant. In my non-native speaker's style.

Once upon a time there was an idea to cook up a Venusian delight. Wonder how it turned out?

geoffrey.landis wrote:There are, I'm told, good reasons for vertical exaggeration, but I really wish that this would be explicitly called out when it is done.

This!