Apr. 4

Mars is getting hotter. Measurements of the brightness of the planet's surface over the show that the thermometer has ratcheted up some 0.65 °C over a few decades.

In particular, the southern highlands region of Mars had darkened significantly.

The darkening is thanks to the clearance of light-coloured dust that covers the planet's darker bedrock, they propose. When the Sun's light hits dark rock it warms the surface, and the heat is kept in by the atmosphere. This warming kicks up winds, which swirl any dust around and can even make dust devils. This sweeps the light-coloured dust into pockets, revealing more bedrock and causing further heating.

The two processes that lift dust are being enhanced by the darkening of the surface, and those are the processes that darken the surface in the first place.

Mars has no oceans or vegetation, and the effects of clouds are nowhere near as important as they are on Earth.

Using these results, one might come to the conclusion that in 500 or so years the martian polar ice-caps will be completely gone. Looking at a piece of the cycle, other processes could turn this around to a place where the ice-caps start growing again.

A major dust storm that engulfs the entire planet, for example, could redistribute dust more evenly around the planet and instigate cooling. Dust storms are like a reset mechanism. Such storms were seen on the planet in the 1970s.

If Mars is hotting up even without any cars or pollution, then perhaps the Sun or some other natural, Solar-System-wide factor is to blame.

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Man, I need to stop driving my SUV! They are so bad for the environment, now they're even causing global warming on Mars!?

All kidding aside. The fact that the warming trend on Earth correlates with the Solar Cycle and that Earth is not the only planet showing warming all argue against the idea that climate change on Earth is being driven by human activities. I think all the money that is going into idiotic things like pollution credits should instead be going into researching equipment and processes we can use to survive the warming being caused by the Sun.

Interesting.

I do think earth is getting hotter. I however think it has more to do with the sun than this planet. If Mars is getting hotter as well that would seem to be evidence.

I think this topic is likely to generate a lot of discussion (doesn't any thing vaguely connected with global warming?) It is more likely to generate this discussion in the Space and Astronomy forum than it is in the Space News forum (where it is likely to get buried fairly quickly). As a result I have taken the liberty of moving it.

I was under the impression that the dust storms could be the cause of the global warming. The way I understood it, the dust particles are being warmed by the sun, and in turn, heating up the atmosphere on Mars.

Indeed. The process suggested for Mars' warming has nothing to do with the global warming that Earth is experiencing. It does not support either side in the human v natural causes debate.

LOL...I understand that. I was never insinuating they were somehow connected. My question is this, IF the storms are the cause of the global warming on Mars, then wouldn't it cool off as the storm subsided?

I don't think anyone is disputing the role the solar cycle has to play in the warming trend we are currently experiencing. We can correlate this with cores taken which show the warming/cooling cycles for the past few hundred thousand years.

We haven't been able to see this trend on another planet for obvious reasons and to do so now is very exciting. However it is the scale and rapidity of the current warming trend, when compared to previous trends observed in the core samples that is causing scientists and governments to be concerned. In the larger picture of the world economy, the money that needs to be spent to reduce our carbon output is minimal compared to what could happen if we are contributing to this cycle. While it may end up not having to be spent, it really is a case of no real pain to spend what may be required but considerable pain if the money's not spent and we find out later it should have been.

Now if Mars is warming, any water ice will melt, further increasing the atmospheric pressure and melting the ice caps. This is simular to what is going on with Earth...I mostly think it is due to solar cycles of warming and cooling.
Now for an interesting thought, if Mars had global warming, enough to melt subsurface water ice, would we see a thicking atmosphere, warmer temps and water on the surface due to increased atmospheric pressure? Some time in Mars' past , those conditions were present. At one time it rained and possibly thunderstormed on Mars. Could that event be coming again?

Why would this raise the atmospheric pressure any significant amount? Even on Earth the water content of the atmosphere is not a significant contributer to atmospheric pressure.

You are jumping to a series of huge conclusions:

• That this warming will continue and is not part of the normal cycle of events on Mars
• That the warming on Mars will lead to the poles melting (the poles melt and reform as a result of seasonale changes anyway).
• That the poles melting will cause further global warming on Mars.
• That this rise in temperature will be sufficient to release large amounts of subsurface water.

Earth is at the triple point of water. This means that the temperature and pressure conditions are such that water can easily exist as solid, liquid and gas on Earth. This is not the case on Mars, it would need a considerable change in conditions to make it so. Melting the poles isn't going to do it. The pressure on Mars is so low that water sublimes (goes straight from ice to vapour). Even the recently discovered evidence of water on the surface of Mars shows that it remains as liquid for only a short amount of time.

It is millions, maybe billions of years sice there were last open bodies of water on Mars (if they ever existed). It seems highly unlikely that water is going to suddenly reappear. Unless some other process thickens the atmosphere of Mars we are unlikely to see liquid water on it's surface.

Very much depends on how often this has happened in the past. Mars isn't massive enough to retain very much atmosphere so if the frozen CO2 and H2O sublimed into a gaseous atmosphere much of it would bleed off into space over time. If this has happened regularly in the past I would imagine there isn't much left to generate any new atmosphere even if Mars were to warm sufficiently.

It's quite possible the small polar caps are virtually all that is left of what may have been a much thicker atmosphere in the past.

Certainly some of Mars' H₂O has bled into space but there seems to be a considerable amount locked into the soil. Where all the CO₂ has gone remains a mystery.

Waspie:

If substansial water vapor is present, then it will act like a greenhouse gas as it does on Earth. More or less, Mars would benefit from more water vapor and the furthering release of other gases to the atmosphere with the warming.

After reading some other threads about this, Mars has suffient gravity to hold an atmosphere about 45% of Earth's. So now, were does that take us?

Not looking for an arguement, just facts....

Well, if the CO2 has mostly bled off, and there are no other gases to speak of to make a substantial atmosphere, the water couldn't form a vapour (or certainly not in any semi-permanent form). Could be why there is a fair amount of it locked in the soil (and the polar caps)?

Also I don't know where the 45% figure is derived from. Mars is only 1/10th as massive as Earth and has no magnetosphere. The Solar Wind would quickly strip any substantial atmosphere even if the gravity was sufficient for it to form. The current atmospheric pressure of Mars is about 1% that of Earth's - warming may be able to increase the atmospheric thickness a bit, but nowhere near 45%. There are water vapour clouds occasionally on Mars, but these aren't permanent enough to contribute to warming.

This is true but it is still a huge assumption that this will lead to a high enough temperature rise to release other gases. As no one even knows what has happen to the thicker Martian atmosphere (or even if it existed) you are taking a lot on trust.

The warmer wetter Mars hypothesis is just one of two competing theories that explain the pressence of surface water in the Martian past. It is also possible that there have never been long periods of Earth like conditions on Mars. By this hypothesis the features carved by water on Mars occured not in a warmer wetter past, but during cycles when the temperature on Mars rose. Water was released rapidly, maybe even catastrophically leading to the canyons and dried river beds we now see. This hypothesis explains why there are such vast water made features when there doesn't seem to be enough water to account for them.

If this second theory is correct then no amount of global warming is ever going to return a thicker atmosphere and oceans to Mars because they were never there to begin with.




I'm not sure where the figure of an atmospere of 45% that of Earth's came from but even if that is the correct maximum that does not mean any such atmosphere existed. As with all things it is never quite as simple as what gravity will allow, there are other factors too (remember Venus has a slightly less gravity than Earth but a far thicker atmosphere with a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth).

It is believed that Mars has had no magnetic field for 4 billion years, This means that, unlike the Earth, the Martian upper atmospere has no protection against the Solar wind. Without a magnetic field high energy particles from the sun rip away the thin outer layer into space. Thus, if Mars ever did have a thicker atmosphere, it may simply not be there to be released by global warming.

The simple fact is that (unlike the Earth) we know next to nothing about the past climate of Mars. Speculation as to what this global warming means is nothing more than guess work.

I have to say that I find the expression,



to be a rather strange one. In many of your posts (and you do have a real ancient Mars =modern Earth fixation) you seem to imply (or say directly) that Mars should be like Earth and that something has gone wrong. Why do you think this?

Mars is an alien world. It is what it is. There is no right or wrong in this, Mars is not a broken world that needs fixing (any more than Venus is). It is simply a world that took a different route to Earth.

Whatever the reasons, I am just speculating as to what happened.
It isn't too far off to believe Mars once had an atmosphere that would have been half of Earth's. remember, Titan has an amosphere thicker than Earth's and it is smaller than Mars. Now if the cold temperatures of Titan are the fact that it has a thick amosphere, then why wouldn't Mars have had one? Mars is colder than Earth, but still in the temporate regions of the Sun.
If it is due to solar wind, then why would not Venus have had it's huge atmosphere blown away due to it's proximity to the sun?
Once again, just very curious and I am open to any facts that are available.

That is a good question, and one I don't really have an answer for. Remeber though that the solar wind is just one of the factors involved and Venus is losing its atmosphere.

These are all possibilities:

The most obvious explanation is that Venus always had a far thicker atmosphere and hence was less affected the losses.

Another possibility is that as Venus has a much higher gravity field than Mars (91% that of Earths) this means that molecules would be required to reach a far higher velocity than at Mars to escape (Venus escape velocity = 10.4kms^-1, Mars escape velocity = 5.0kms^-1, Earth escape velocity = 11.2kms^-1). It could be that even with the higher temperature the solar wind is not powerful enough to blow of as much of Venus' upper atmosphere as Mars.

A third possibility that comes to mind is the effect of volcanism. Both Mars and Venus show signs of powerful volcanos in thier past. Whilst those of Mars are long dead there has been some evidence that there may still be active volcanos on Venus. If there is some replenishment of the atmosphere of Venus this could counteract some of the losses.

It could be a combination of these or (quite possibly) as a result of a process I don't know about.

Waspie,

I thought the Martian volcanoes showed water vapor clouds emitting from them in one photo from a past probe. If that holds true, then they might be still be active a little. And a hurricane like storm over the northern lattitudes. That storm would have had to have enough warm air and vapor to develope, would it not? It wasn't all dust either.

Now another good question, going back to the stereotype of Titan and Mars, Titan's gravity and density is much less than Mars, Mars is a rocky planet, not as dense as Earth, but still respectable in that term. so here is the question:

How and why did Mars lose it's atmosphere? It should have been able to retain an appreciable amount in respect to the fact of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapor, heavier elements of gases.

Seems to me that something either blew it into space or it is locked up in the surface somewhere due to colder climate.

I guess we won't know until someone lands there and does hands on experimentation.

Thanks for your info...

I'm reasonably sure that this was just clouds forming in the same way that clouds form over mountains on Earth. As air hit the mountain (or Martian volcano) it is forced up. As it rises it drops in temperature. Cold air can hold less water vapour than warm air and hence clouds form



I suspect we won't have to wait that long. Each new orbiter or lander carries more sophisticated instrumentation. We may learn the answers long before a human sets foot there.

This could be the single most important question we answer at Mars, if we are to terraform the planet in the future. If the atmosphere has escaped (or there never was a thick atmosphere to begin with) then turning Mars into a hospitable world will be much harder or maybe even impossibe.

If the atmosphere is still there, trapped somewhere then, one day, mankind may be able to release it.

thanks for more info, I have always been obsessed with Mars as a possible Earth, but I know what science has shown and I still have many questions as to what happened.

May I ask of you this question.....do you honestly think Mars was once an earthlike planet, with blue skies and rain?

And if so, do you think there was the possible event of primative life? Like plants.

Something went wrong there and it was most suited at an earlier time to be destined to be another Earth...

Can you please comment on the hurricane feature of about a year ago? seems there is more vapor and pressure than what is measured to form a storm like that...it isn't all dust...or am i wrong again?

Please elaborate if you have some answers....

Thank you...

I think Mars was more Earth like than it is now. It would probably have a blue sky now if it wasn't for the dust that is contained in the atmosphere, so if it was once less desert like then almost certainly it would have had a blue sky.

Recent Rover and orbiter results suggest that there were seas on Mars so the possibility of rain can not be discounted. However saying it was more Earth like is not the same as saying it WAS Earthlike. Mars is an alien world and I doubt that it was ever totally Earthlike but that is only my opinion.

As for life, I see no reason why there couldn't have been primative life forms. This would mean microbes, there is nothing primative about most plant (remember flowers evolved AFTER insects). Mars does not have to have been totally Earthlike for it to have life. As for more advanced life such as planets, that would be pure guess work but there is no evidence to suggest or dismiss the idea.



Again you use the expression "something went wrong". I totally disagree with this point of view as it supposes that there was some purpose for Mars and it failed. As I said earlier, i believe Mars is what it is. Nothing went wrong it just took a different path to Earth



I don't know anything about this particular storm, unless you are talking about the dust devils observed by the rovers. These are just very small lo*spam filter*ed features and simply pick up loose material (in the case of Mars that would be dust). I have walked staight through the middle of a dust devil in England and there is surprisingly little wind force involved.

If it is not these that you are talking about all I can say is that the surface pressure of Mars is well known as it has been directly measured by several missions dating back to the Vikings of 1976. Dust storms are a common feature of Mars and can becore violent enough to cover the entire planet.

Waspie:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sola...em/mars-ez.html

I think this site has the picture of which I am talking about.
There was a better picture that I had seen first, but I cannot find it.
The one I was looking for had the above picture and a picture of a hurricane on earth as comparison.
Maybe you can find it in your archives, waspie.

I think I've found what you are talking about Bulldog. Is this it? Stormy weather on Mars

waspie:

Ya that is a better site you found, but the one I had seen had a earth hurricane for comparison....

Now, I wonder if that Martian storm had thunder and lightning due to it enormous size? I seriously doubt any precipitation was present, but other storm activities could have been.

Thanks again for the help...

I believe Mars never had a dense atmosphere, and was lucky to have one. Just look at other planets, Mercury probably never had an atmosphere due to its low gravity, but venus does because when the solar system was formed with the formation of the sun, it had the adventage of having quite strong gravity and having a close distance to the sun.

Earth had similar adventage to Venus, Earth has a stronger gravity than Venus but not enough distance from the Sun to grab more gas particles during the formation of the Sun and the solar system.

Mars, had realy little adventage, Mars always had very weak gravity and is very far from the Sun, far from the hot gas in the inner solar system and far from residue gas in the outer solar system. So it realy had very little advantege in the formation from the Sun and the solar system.

The gas giants's gravity is quite a mystery but they were problably formed by the residue gas that was kept in the outer solar system during its formation. Of caurse the gas giants needed quite some gravity to acumulate all that gas, the source of that gravity; I don't know.

Don't ask me about Mercury because it is a mystery to me why it never had an atmosphere or maybe it had it but due to its close distance to the Sun, it might got blown of by solar wind or engulfed by the Sun's strong gravity.

I believe that in the formation of a solar system, there is an order. Of caurse, gravity pays an important role in this order. Gravity pretty much organizes all the gas and dust particles. So in the inner solar system there would be the hottest gas, cotinuely in combustion with other rocks such as asteroids and in the outer solar system there would be the residue gas, very cold and mixed with rocks and dust particles, this would form the gas giants and its moons.


So, I have come to a conclution and it is that Mars just wasn't in the place during the formation of the solar system to have a thick atmosphere like Venus and Earth or to have no atmosphere at all. It's gravity didn't help it to grab more gas and dust particles and I believe that the gas and dust particles were syghtly limited in that part of the solar system when it's formation.

maybe mars had atmosphere before when it's gravity was still strong. when it's core was still fluid.

The gravitional attraction of an object is dependent on the object's mass. Thus, for Mars, it will have remained almost totally constant since the planet formed.

I watched a program discussing the possibilities of terraforming Mars. Wouldn't the weak (or non-existent?) elecro-magnetic field affect the atmosphere too much to terraform? They didn't really address this in the program so I was hoping you might know.

And what about Venus? Does it have an electro-magnetic field?

I think only Mercury, Earth and Jupiter have magnetic fields. Mars has magnetic "hot spots" from ancient times.
I could be wrong....

Well wouldn't the ammount of CO2 make one hell of a greenhouse effect?

Iamson says:



Comparing Mars and Earth is like comparing apples to oranges.

Earth is not just 'warming up' and it's NOT being caused by the sun. The global weather patterns are changing, and at an exponential rate. This means the changes are coming faster each year. Even with solar cycles, more light is actually being reflected back out into space...due to particulate matter in the clouds and the atmosphere. This phenomenon is known as 'global dimming'. The heat from the sun, however, is staying because of the greenhouse effect. Dumping billions of tons of excess CO-2 into the atmosphere, the hacking down of Earth's forests, and the increased sources of heat on the planet (cars, machinery, your home, etc.) are beginning to have drastic effects.

Don't blame the sun. That's a cop-out.
Blame man.

Venus has no internally-generated magnetic field. Terraforming Mars would be insufficient to make it habitable for the same reason. There would be nothing to prevent a lot of the hard radiation from space reaching the surface (apart from the thin atmosphere) so life on Mars (apart, perhaps, from hardy bacteria) would be extremely difficult.




All the planets so far explored from space have magnetospheres, just that some are extremely weak. Linky. As far as I can tell only Venus and Mars have induced magnetospheres, all the other planets (except, perhaps, Pluto) have magnetospheres at least partially created by their own, internal magnetic field.



If you are talking about Mars, it has a high percentage by volume of CO2 in the atmosphere, but the atmosphere itself is so thin the actual volume is insufficient to effect a greenhouse situation.

You're my super smart hero....

First off, if Mars was destined to be another Earth, things would have stayed within what we call Earth normal.
Mars would have had: lesser gravity, an atmosphere about 45% of Earth's and temperatures cooler than Earth, but not unlike early spring temperatures in the northern hemisphere of Earth. Those gases in the atmosphere would have been Carbon Dioxide, Nitrogen and water vapor. Breathable air? No, that requires lifeforms that transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. not saying they didn't start, but they are not there now.

Life evolving? It would evolve slower at those conditions than it did on Earth, but it would evolve.

What has happened is Mars lost it's amosphere due to cosmic events, natural events and what is left today is a barren rock in space, with a small atmosphere and some things that remind us of Earth. Those are gullies, water clouds and ice caps of water.

If Mars is warming, it is due to the dust in the air and the release of water vapor from the caps.

We all tend to look at Mars as an equal to Earth, but it evolved differently. At one time it had Earth conditions, but now it is nothing more than a wasteland of dust and ancient relics of what it was.

the lighter gases that are present in Earth's atmosphere would have escaped Mars over time.

It seems that Mars went a different path than Earth, but Mars is still in the habital zone in the solar system.

There are too many simularities, 24 hr day, axis tilt and evidence of water. Those are what we all see and fail to face what space probes have found.

Maybe when Man explores the planet himself, we will find what happend. Just my opinion..

In 2,000 yrs from now Mars might have a breathable atmosphere.

It is breathable for plants! I vote we go now and introduce vegatation so we can move there when our planet becomes uninhabital.
It's just so cold we'll have to bring heaters

Actually for most plants it isn't. It is possible for bacteria and maybe moses and lichen to survive in Martian conditions but the atmospheric pressure is so low that more complex plants would die. Also it is not known whether plants could survive in the martian soil or not. Add to that the fact that, at the surface, most of Mars is drier than any desert on Earth and so cold at night that most plants would require a green house and it becomes apparant that simply sending plants there is not an option.

This sounds, unfortunately, like a typical cop out...the cop-out of one who relies on "plausible" belief rather than hard science.

There are also exaggerations present in this statement.

Global weather patterns are not changing at an "exponential rate". Global weather patterns are always in flux. There is no doubt that the mean temperature of the planet has increased over the past two decades, and that weather patterns have changed. This is observable. However, there is nothing exponential about any of it, and such fluxes have been observed before.

I often wonder why no one seems to mention the fact that the global temperature rose at a slightly higher rate between 1920 and 1940 than it has for the past 20 years, when man made CO2 production was no where near what it was today, and of course, for the next several decades...it dropped, during a period of increasing greenhouse gas emmissions by man....

This of course prompted several to theorize that we were in the throes of an impending ice age in the 1970s...another idea that was swiftly relegated to the trash bin.


One would be hard pressed to sustain a man-made global warming hypothesis in the face of the facts that exists as we speak:


Alaska is still melting from more snow than it's seen in a very, very long time (Alaska, mind you, where snow is common and sustained).
The northern tier of New York had more snow and cold this winter than it too has seen in a very long time.
And of course, at this very moment, a winter-cycle noreaster is dumping scads of snow in Northern PA and the Northeast, and in SE PA today, there was SNOW FALLING on April 16...

...over three weeks after the spring equinox, when it should be in the 60s and birds should be building their nests and the trees should be greening.


Every time Al Gore opens his mouth, Mother Nature proves him to be as unqualified as we know he is.


No "drastic effect" has been observed or substantiated as pertains to man. Indeed, we have observed no drastic effect from things not of man, and which have caused greenhouse gas emmissions on a scale that man could not even begin to contemplate (eg., Mt. St. Helens eruption, 1980).

We have observed the variants in weather we are seeing now many times in the history of recorded observations.

Science is, among other things, about studying the planet and its ecosystem, it's climate, etc., and understanding those things. We are in first grade in those aspects at the moment. We actually cannot predict weather with any acuracy beyond 48 hours in most circumstances (despite the local "accu-weather"(sic) proclamations) . Yet, the media in its insanity actually produces such poppycock as 5, 7, and 10 day forecasts...none of which have ever been shown to be correct.


Yet, your statements lead one to believe that MAN is responsible for the impending global climate doom. MAN is to "blame".


This leads me to think that you, among many others, are of the mind, and the self-important egotism, which maintains than measly little man, a microcosm on the surface of this massive planet, actually has the power to make "exponential" changes in the planet's climate...and are actually so influential that they are responsible for massive, exponential and disastrous climate change....when massive eruptions of volcanoes, which are mere pimples on the surface of this magnificent world, and which cause more CO2 hell in one day than all the cars in the U.S. could cause in a decade..can't(??)

There is absolutely no evidence of such a scenario.

When you say:




You are at once affixing "blame" for something that very likely needs no blame(that is a very human thing...blame, and you are affixing it to nature, which commits no wrongs, and garners no blame) you are putting forth a rather distressing notion...


That the completely plausible notion that the Sun, which powers everything in the solar system as pertains to planetary cycles, climates, etc... and is completely responsible for the climatic cycles on the Earth, is a "cop-out", and further, that man, who in your opinion, is responsible for climate change, is somehow more powerful than the Sun.


That is very distressing....

People, there are many MANY threads on Earth's global warming. You can find them in the Science & Technology forum. the Natural World forum and even the Conspiracies & Secret Societies forum. This thread is about global warming on Mars. Please try and remain on topic.

True enough, Waspie.
However, I noted that the OP made the connection between Earth and Mars in her conclusion to post #1:



The correlation is, of course, pertinent.
Thus, I responded to Blevins' post in that fashion, since he seemed to desire to spout facts regarding a man-made global warming hypothesis on Earth.

There are obviously other hypotheses present, some more plausible than others...

MID, the comment wasn't made at anyone in particular, just a general comment to try and keep the thread on topic.

Where a comparison is being made between the global warming on Mars and Earth then of course that is on topic.

Once we start getting into the specifics of debating whether Earth's global warming is man made or not we are beginning to drift off topic and in to territory covered by so many other threads on this site.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but we did discuss the idea of introducing vegetation to mars in a university class I've just finished and the main problem (atmospheric pressure/temperature aside) was that there was a very high level of hydrogen peroxide in the soil..wouldn't that prevent most..if not all plants from surviving?

All i know that Hydrogen Peroxide is a Manufactured Chemical. and yes it is found naturally in air but most likely to be a small amount. and hey! welcome to the UM. enjoy your stay.

Thank you
I did find this as a support for my initial claim,
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?o...le&sid=2045
maybe that will clear some things up.

awesome post