Why is the mass of atmosphere of Venus so much greater than that of the Earth?
It is thought that about 4 billion years ago, Venus had an atmosphere and oceans similar to Earth's. Owing to it's proximity to the sun and the fact that most of its primeval atmosphere was carbon dioxide, it heated up and the oceans evaporated away, causing more greenhouse heating as they did so. Water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas.

Earth's primeval atmosphere was also mainly CO2, but being about 30 million miles further away from the sun it did not experience the runaway greenhouse effect which overheated Venus. The seas did not evaporate into the atmosphere, as they did on Venus, where the water mixed with sulphur dioxide/trioxide to create clouds of sulphuric acid droplets.

Another thing which has thinned the Earth's atmosphere is billions of years of sequestration by living things, which have transformed atmospheric CO2 into limestone (CaCO3), other carbonates, and various forms of fossil hydrocarbons (Lange et al., 1983). The photosynthetic organisms which produced the hydrocarbons also produced huge quantities of oxygen, which today makes up 21 percent of our atmosphere.

If you could magically turn all the carbon sequestered away in the rocks back into CO2, and evaporate our oceans so that they went up into the atmosphere, the Earth would be much more like Venus, including the runaway greenhouse effect which has heated Venus's lower atmosphere to 460C. Being much further away from the sun than Venus, Earth would not heat up as much as that, but it would still be too hot for life.

Mars also had an atmosphere similar to Earth's and Venus's, but because of its much weaker gravitational field has been unable to hang onto them. However, the proportions of the gases in the Martian atmosphere are still similar to those on Venus, though far more tenuous.



Lange, M. A. &amp; Ahrens, T. J.(1983):"Shock-Induced CO2-PRODUCTION from Carbonates and a PROTO-CO2-ATMOSPHERE on the Earth", LUNAR AND PLANETARY SCIENCE XIV, P. 419-420.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1983LPI....14..419L