The Hot Breath of Venus

Cartoon of a HFA on Venus. Image Credit NASA

The planet Venus is an enigma to the planetary science community. The primary reason is their insistence on the uniformitarian paradigm, which is the belief (assumption?) that the solar system has been in its present form for billions of years. This assumption corrupts the open-minded interpretation of data returned from every planetary probe. As a result, Venus is imagined to be as ancient as the Earth, having lost its oxygen, oceans and biosphere due to a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’, a term coined by Carl Sagan and endlessly repeated by every PhD astrophysics candidate in order to get their degrees. This unproveable assumption leads to numerous difficulties in explaining Venus’ (a) extremely high surface temperature (hot enough to melt lead and zinc); (b) extremely high surface pressure (91 times that on the Earth); (c) extremely slow retrograde rotation, resulting in a single day lasting 254 Earth days; (d) the amazing revelation that Venus’ rotation period, measured by the ESA’s Venus Express VIRTIS infrared instrument has increased by 6.5 minutes relative to the measurements made by NASA Magellan probe only about a decade earlier; (e) complete lack of any global magnetic field. All of which are explained by Venus’ recent creation from a high energy impact on Jupiter 6,000 years ago, witnessed by the entire world and described in a number of ancient texts. Cyclic Catastrophism explains that Venus’ interior is cooling by a heretofore unknown process – the high velocity jetting of hot sulfur (S8 and larger sulfur allotropes) from over one million ‘small domes’ (which NASA calls shield volcanoes) imaged by Magellan and Venera radars, to an elevation of 48 km where it crystallizes to form the ubuquitous lower cloud layer, which obscures the entire planet on both the day and night sides. The newly observed ‘Hot Breath of Venus’ are blasts of these hot gases ejected into space, called Hot Flow Anomalies (HFAs). Based on Venus Express data, these can be as large as the planet itself and can occur several times a day. Because Venus’ interior is molten it has no global magnetic field. Therefore its atmosphere is compressed on the day side by the solar wind and these HFAs occur just above the ionosphere. The jetting heavy gas carries with it a small amount of angular momentum, producing the high altitude winds that circle the entire planet in four days, also resulting in the recently measured slowing of Venus’ rotation. The HFAs occur at breaks in the high altitude winds where the hot gases rising from the surface penetrate into space. Because astrophysicists in general have no idea of this cooling process, they do not realize they have discovered what is slowing the rotation of planet.

John Ackerman’s old paper describing the cyclic catastrophism interpretation of the Pioneer Venus data was presented at the JGR Meeting in Washing D.C. in 2002.