Venus may be actively tearing itself apart, new simulations suggest

For decades, Venus has been treated as a dead world—a hellish, geologically frozen place where nothing much happens beneath the sulfuric clouds. New computer simulations suggest that view may be dangerously wrong. The planet appears to be actively tearing itself apart, with massive rift valleys still widening and reshaping the landscape in ways scientists are only now beginning to understand.

The evidence centers on Venus's enormous rift valleys, some stretching as far as 10,000 kilometers across the planet's surface. Earth has similar formations—the African Rift Valley being the most famous—but nothing quite on the Venusian scale. For a long time, geologists assumed these vast rifts were ancient relics, carved into the planet's crust more than 100 million years ago and left essentially untouched ever since. That assumption has now been challenged by research from ETH Zurich, where a team led by Taras Gerya, a professor of geodynamics, used advanced three-dimensional computer modeling to suggest that some of these rifts are far younger than previously thought, and may still be actively expanding.

The breakthrough came from moving beyond the simplified two-dimensional models that had dominated the field. Xi Yang, working under Gerya's supervision, and his colleagues built the first high-resolution 3D simulations of how Venusian rifts actually form and evolve. The models revealed something striking: when a rift is young and actively spreading, it develops distinctive raised ridges along its flanks—elevated features that appear while the crust is still being pulled apart. As the rift ages and movement ceases, these flanks gradually flatten and subside, a process driven not by erosion, as happens on Earth, but by the slow relaxation of the stretched crust itself. The simulations suggested that Venusian rifts can widen by three to ten centimeters each year, faster than scientists had previously estimated.

What makes this work particularly compelling is that the simulated structures match what spacecraft have actually observed. Images from the Magellan probe, which orbited Venus in the 1990s, show exactly the kind of broad, elevated rift flanks that the new models predict should exist on young, active rifts. This alignment between simulation and observation provides strong evidence that some of Venus's most prominent geological features are not ancient monuments but relatively recent formations—and possibly still evolving. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, fundamentally shifts how scientists think about Venus's interior dynamics. Rather than a geologically dormant world, Venus appears to harbor a far more active and restless interior than anyone had assumed.

The implications extend beyond pure curiosity about Venus itself. Understanding how and why these rifts form could help scientists identify regions where geological activity might still be occurring, making those areas prime targets for future exploration. As NASA and the European Space Agency prepare multiple missions to Venus for the early 2030s—including ESA's EnVision orbiter, to which Gerya and his colleagues are contributing instruments—this new knowledge becomes immediately practical. The ability to predict where tectonic or volcanic activity might still be happening could transform how scientists design and prioritize their investigations. More broadly, understanding how a rocky planet like Venus develops and evolves over time offers clues about how similar worlds elsewhere in the galaxy might behave, potentially making it easier to detect and study exoplanets beyond our solar system. Venus, it turns out, is not the dead world we thought we knew.