<p>With the selection of multiple missions to Venus by NASA and ESA planned to launch in the coming decade, we will greatly improve our understanding of Venus as a planet. However, the selected missions cannot tell us anything about the seismicity on Venus, which is a crucial observable to constrain the tectonic activity and geodynamic regime of the planet, and its interior structure.<span>&#160;</span></p><p>Here, we provide new, preliminary estimates of Venus&#8217; global annual seismic budget and the expected frequency of venusquakes per year. We obtain this estimate by scaling the seismicity of the Earth recorded in the CMT catalogue. We test different potential scaling factors based on e.g., the difference in mass, radius, potential seismogenic volume, etc. We also sort the earthquakes into their respective tectonic settings, which allows us to exclude irrelevant tectonic settings present on Earth, but most likely not on Venus from our analysis. This enables us to present a range of potential seismic budgets and venusquake frequencies per tectonic setting on Venus. <span>&#160;</span></p><p>This then provides a new estimate of the potential amount of seismicity on Venus. However, it is uncertain how valid this simple scaling approach is from Earth to Venus. Indeed, previous attempts of scaling the volcanism of Earth to Venus (Byrne & Krishnamoorthy, 2022; Van Zelst, 2022) resulted in numbers that aligned with independent estimates, but are still unconstrained and hard to verify until the announced missions fly. Therefore, in order to provide a more robust and holistic view of Venus&#8217; anticipated seismicity, estimates using various different, independent methods should ideally be considered.</p><p>To provide exactly that, we set up the ISSI team &#8216;Seismicity on Venus: Prediction & Detection&#8217;. This is an interdisciplinary team of experts in seismology, geology, and geodynamics. Together we aim to assess the seismic activity on Venus from a theoretical and instrumental perspective. In addition to presenting our preliminary seismicity estimates from scaling Earth to Venus, we therefore also use this contribution to briefly introduce the team and its goals and present the preliminary findings from our first, week-long, dedicated in-person meeting aimed at further characterising Venus&#8217; seismicity.<span>&#160;</span></p><p><strong>References</strong></p><p>Byrne, Paul K., and Siddharth Krishnamoorthy. "Estimates on the frequency of volcanic eruptions on Venus." Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 127.1 (2022): e2021JE007040.</p><p>van Zelst, Iris. "Comment on &#8220;Estimates on the Frequency of Volcanic Eruptions on Venus&#8221; by Byrne & Krishnamoorthy (2022)." Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets (2022): e2022JE007448.</p>
There is a growing consensus that Venus is seismically active, although its level of seismicity could be very different from that of Earth due to the lack of plate tectonics. Here, we estimate upper and lower bounds on the expected annual seismicity of Venus by scaling the seismicity of the Earth. We consider different scaling factors for different tectonic settings and account for the lower seismogenic zone thickness of Venus. We find that 11 - 34 venusquakes >=Mw5 per year are expected for an inactive Venus, where the global seismicity rate is similar to that of continental intraplate seismicity on Earth. For the active Venus scenarios, we assume that the coronae, ridges, and rifts of Venus are currently seismically active. This results in 126 - 391 venusquakes >=Mw5 annually as a realistic lower bound and 465 - 1446 venusquakes >=Mw5 as a maximum upper bound for an active Venus.
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