Inadvertently, through our centuries of carbon emissions, we've raised the surface temperature of Earth through a simple greenhouse mechanism. We pump out a lot of carbon dioxide, which is really good at letting sunlight in and preventing thermal radiation from escaping, so it acts like a giant invisible blanket over Earth.
The increased heat encourages moisture to leave the oceans and play around as a vapor in the atmosphere, which adds its own blanketing layer, adding to the increase in temperature, which evaporates more water, which warms the planet more, and before you know if prime beachfront property is now better suited as an underwater submarine base. But if it works on Earth , maybe it could work on Mars. We can't access the OG Martian atmosphere, because it's completely lost to space, but Mars does have enormous deposits of water ice and frozen carbon dioxide in its polar caps, and some more laced just underneath the surface across the planet.
If we could somehow warm the caps, that might release enough carbon into the atmosphere to kick-start a greenhouse warming trend. All we would need to do is kick back, watch and wait for a few centuries for physics to do its thing and turn Mars into a much less nasty place. Related: What would it be like to live on Mars? The first issue is developing the technology to warm the caps. Proposals have ranged from sprinkling dust all across the poles to make them reflect less light and warm them up to building a giant space mirror to put some high-beam action on the poles.
But any ideas require radical leaps in technology, and a manufacturing presence in space far beyond what we are currently capable of in the case of the space mirror, we would need to mine about , tons of aluminum in space, whereas we are currently capable of mining … well, zero tons of aluminum in space.
And then there's the unfortunate realization that there isn't nearly enough CO2 locked up in Mars to trigger a decent warming trend.
Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Prev NEXT. Future Space. By: Kevin Bonsor. Photo courtesy Lightworld. Large orbital mirrors that will reflect sunlight and heat the Mars surface.
Greenhouse gas-producing factories to trap solar radiation. Smashing ammonia-heavy asteroids into the planet to raise the greenhouse gas level. Cite This! Print Citation. You can literally squeeze it onto a T-shirt and buy it from SpaceX's online merch shop. Musk maintains that lobbing nuclear bombs at the ice caps could melt the ice and put sufficient carbon dioxide into the air.
If space weren't a vacuum devoid of sound, though, you might hear screeching brakes in the background right now. It turns out humans can't really do any of this. In July , researchers Bruce Jakosky and Christopher Edwards released a study making it clear that for all the ideas that have been bandied about for decades, humans just don't have the technology right now to terraform Mars.
There's a laundry list of questions to answer: How exactly do you build a giant mirror in space? How do you get access to and redirect the thousands of asteroids needed to sling at Mars? Would it be safe to have anyone on the surface while you do this? How do you build a factory when you don't even have a tent pitched? What happens when you nuke the ice caps, and the gases just refreeze?
Having sufficiently popped the terraforming bubble, it's unsurprising NASA is focusing its efforts elsewhere. But just because you can't flip a climate change switch on a planet doesn't mean there aren't other ways to alter it, perhaps on a much smaller scope.
One idea researchers are looking into is using aerogel to maybe one day build structures like greenhouses. Unfortunately, they found, there just isn't enough CO2 on Mars to make the planet Earth-like. On Mars, CO2 is present in rocks and the polar ice caps. Jakosky and Edwards used data from the various rovers and spacecraft observing and studying Mars from the past 20 years to essentially take an inventory of the planet's stored CO2.
They documented all of Mars' surface and subsurface CO2 reservoirs and how much of the gas exists and could be put into the planet's atmosphere to change it. To successfully terraform Mars, the atmosphere would need to be raised enough so that humans could walk around without spacesuits.
But although tripling the Red Planet's atmospheric pressure might sound like a lot, it's only one-fiftieth of the CO2 necessary to make the atmosphere habitable to Earth creatures.
Additionally, the amount of accessible CO2 the researchers found would raise the planet's temperature by less than 18 degrees Fahrenheit 10 degrees Celsius. And because temperatures on Mars average minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit minus 60 degrees Celsius , with winter temperatures plummeting low enough for CO2 in the atmosphere to condense into ice on the surface, it wouldn't make enough of a difference, the study authors said.
Moreover, even if there were more CO2 on Mars, most of it would be very difficult to access, and it would take a lot of effort to release that gas into the planet's atmosphere, according to the paper.
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