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This week, Dr. De Toffoli and her colleagues announced the 2025 Lorentz Workshop in Leiden, the Netherlands, titled “Roadmap to the Exploration of Venus Habitability” from 9-12 February 2026. “The workshop will bring together experts from different fields to explore whether Venus may once have been habitable by examining the coevolution of the planet’s surface,…

Dr. De Toffoli presented “The first evidence of lava tubes on Venus” at EPSC in Helsinki on 9 September 2025. She and her collaborators showed confirmation of very large lava tubes on Venus with unusual geometries which may be regions of interest for future Venus missions. Figure 1. Collapse width W versus linear volume V1 expressed…

Drs. De Toffoli and Montiel presented their work on coronal resurfacing at the joint Division of Planetary Science (DPS) and Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) meeting in Helsinki, Finland on 8 September 2025.

Dr. Montiel published “Regionalized formation and recycling of new Venusian crust at chasmata” in Planetary Science Journal on 2 September 2025. The thesis of the paper is that the majority of Venusian rift systems do not represent a Venusian equivalent to seafloor spreading because seafloor spreading under Venusian conditions doesn’t look very different from what…

Dr. De Toffoli published “Subsurface mechanical architecture of coronae on Venus and its implications for processes governing fractures and seismicity” in the journal Scientific Reports. ABSTRACT: “Coronae are essential to understanding the tectonic evolution of Venus. This study explores their subsurface architecture by analyzing coronae’s fracture populations. We perform fractal analyses of mapped fractures revealing…

Drs. De Toffoli and Montiel presented preliminary results on the anti-correlation between coronae and volcanoes and on fractal analysis on coronae’s radial and concentric fractures at the 20th Congresso Nazionale di Scienze Planetarie.