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Early Venus Climate Model

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Michael Way from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and his colleagues have applied the first three-dimensional climate model to early Venus in order to visualize the complexities of its atmosphere and to predict how Venus might have looked in its early existence. The model uses the same computer simulations used to predict climate changes on Earth in order to predict climate changes on early Venus. The team ran the model for Venus’s climate 2.9 billion years ago, and then again for 715 million years ago. Keeping Venus’s present-day topography and rotation speed intact, they discovered that the temperature of Venus 2.9 billion years ago could have been similar to Earth’s (around 11 degrees Celsius) and that the planet would have only

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