Nature: Compared with Mars, Mercury, and the Moon, Venus shows little surface cratering. Vulcanism and other active crustal processes must have rubbed out the ancient craters, but when? Previous theories posited a violent phase of Venusian vulcanism that ended no later than 300 million years ago. Nature‘s Eugenie Samuel Reich reports that those theories are being challenged in the light of recent observations of active volcanoes made by the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft.
