Venus might be hiding an entire Earth's worth of ocean water deep under its surface.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Investigation of Venus' thermal history, crustal evolution, and core dynamics with a coupled interior-lithosphere-atmosphere model
arXiv · 2603.18070
The Takeaway
While Venus is often viewed as a dry, hellish wasteland, new simulations suggest it never actually lost its water—it simply locked it away in the rocks deep underground. The study also concludes that Venus is not 'volcanically dead' as previously thought, but likely remains active with erupting lava today.
From the abstract
We simulate Venus' evolution with a coupled one-dimensional solar-atmosphere-lithosphere-mantle-core model to predict currently unobservable features and its eruptive mass flux. We identified four distinct evolutionary pathways that simultaneously match the atmospheric abundances of water and carbon dioxide as well as the lack of a core dynamo. These scenarios are characterized by I) generally monotonic cooling, II) a low mantle melt fraction in which Venus' volcanically active phase is ending,