[Artist Concept] Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to 2 billion years of its early history, according to computer modeling of the planet's ancient climate by scientists at our Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. A land-ocean pattern like in this image was used in a climate model to show how storm clouds could have shielded ancient Venus from strong sunlight and made the planet habitable.
Venus today is a hellish world. It has a crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere 90 times as thick as Earth's. There is almost no water vapor. Temperatures reach 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius) at its surface.
Credits: NASA [Artist Concept]
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