Editing Openai/6946e998-79f0-8007-9a65-19828450838d (section)

=== Venus’s runaway greenhouse didn’t just eliminate water—it also created a surface at ~735 K: ===
* Rocks are weaker at high temperatures, but
* The near-surface becomes too hot for brittle fracture—meaning the lithosphere deforms plastically instead of breaking into plates.

Plate tectonics needs brittle failure (faulting, fracturing).
Venus’s 460°C surface suppresses brittle behavior.

Thus:
* Earth: surface cool enough for brittle lithosphere → faults and subduction can form → plates.
* Venus: surface too hot → lithosphere becomes ductile → plates cannot form.

This is a climate–geology feedback loop.
The runaway greenhouse shuts down tectonics, and the loss of tectonics prevents CO₂ recycling, locking in catastrophic heating.