Composition of Venus' Atmosphere

About This Dataset

This chart shows the composition of Venus's atmosphere by volume. Like Mars it is dominated by carbon dioxide, but Venus's atmosphere is extraordinarily thick, driving a runaway greenhouse effect.

✨ AI Insight

Venus's atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen, a composition broadly similar to Mars yet with dramatically different consequences. Because Venus's atmosphere is roughly 90 times as massive as Earth's, that carbon dioxide traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, producing surface temperatures near 465 C, hot enough to melt lead. Everything beyond CO2 and nitrogen exists only in trace amounts: sulfur dioxide (about 0.015%) feeds the planet's thick sulfuric-acid clouds, while argon, water vapour and carbon monoxide register at just a few parts per million. The near-total absence of water and free oxygen, together with the crushing carbon-dioxide load, makes Venus a cautionary example of how the very same dominant gas yields a frozen desert on Mars but a furnace on Venus, depending on atmospheric mass.

Source: NASA / Atmosphere of Venus

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

🏆

Carbon Dioxide leads with 97 in All Time.

📊

Average value in All Time: 17 · median: 0.

↔️

Gap in All Time: Carbon Dioxide is 56764.7× larger than Carbon Monoxide.