Cool! Here’s how Venus would look as a water world

It’s hot enough on the surface of Venus to melt lead. There are also crushing surface pressures and clouds full of sulfuric acid. So there’s no water on the surface of Venus today. This planet – orbiting next-inward from Earth around the sun – is one of the most inhospitable places in our solar system. But scientists think that, a few billion years ago, Venus might have had oceans, perhaps much like those on Earth. Venus might once have been habitable. Even now, some have suggested terraforming Venus, so that it could become a water world once again in the future. What would Venus look like with water? Reddit user Dragonite-2 has created a map, based on spacecraft data about Venus’ terrain, and posted it to the MapPorn subreddit. It portrays Venus if it were terraformed to become a more Earth-like world, with a similar amount of water to Earth.

The map has now gone viral.

How accurate is it? And what does it show?

Venus is covered with dense clouds. So we can’t see its surface. But radar – from spacecraft orbiting this world, or (in the early days) from Earth – can penetrate the planet’s clouds and has let scientists make maps of the highs and lows on Venus’ surface. That’s why Venus has a known topography, which Dragonite-2 used to create his map of Venus as a water world. Radar images show us Venus’ mountain ranges, volcanoes, quasi-continental formations and other, flatter regions.

Thus, we’ve known – and now Dragonite-2 has helped us see – that if Venus had an Earth-like quantity of water, it would have one large continent in its northern hemisphere. Scientists have named this continent already; they call it Ishtar Terra. It’s about the size of Australia. The highest point on Venus, the mountain Maxwell Montes, is located on Ishtar Terra. There’s also a second large continent – which scientists call Aphrodite Terra – located along the equator of Venus. It’s the size of South America (if South America were stretched out along Earth’s equator, instead of running perpendicular to it). Dragonite-2’s map also illustrates smaller continents and islands that would be scattered throughout Venus’ global oceans, if Venus were a water world.