Scientists propose much more efficient method for warming Mars to habitable temperatures
Global map of known exposed scarps of ice on Mars. North and south of the
white hatched lines, near surface ice and glaciers are common.
Scientists have now proposed much more efficient method for warming the climate of the planet Mars by as much 50 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to melt much of the near-surface ice in the middle latitudes and thus make the planet habitable.
This new method, using engineered dust particles released to the atmosphere, could potentially warm the Red Planet by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit, to temperatures suitable for microbial life—a crucial first step towards making Mars habitable.
The proposed method is over 5,000 times more efficient than previous schemes to globally warm Mars, representing a significant leap forward in our ability to modify the Martian environment. What sets this approach apart is its use of resources readily available on Mars, making it far more feasible than earlier proposals that relied on importing materials from Earth or mining rare Martian resources.
You can read the paper here. From the abstract:
One-third of Mars’ surface has shallow-buried H2O, but it is currently too cold for use by life. Proposals to warm Mars using greenhouse gases require a large mass of ingredients that are rare on Mars’ surface. However, we show here that artificial aerosols made from materials that are readily available at Mars—for example, conductive nanorods that are ~9 micrometers long—could warm Mars >5 × 103 time smore effectively than the best gases. Such nanoparticles forward-scatter sunlight and efficiently block upwelling thermal infrared. Like the natural dust of Mars, they are swept high into Mars’ atmosphere, allowing delivery from the near-surface. For a 10-year particle lifetime, two climate models indicate that sustained release at 30 liters per second would globally warm Mars by ≳30 kelvin and start to melt the ice. Therefore, if nanoparticles can be made at scale on (or delivered to) Mars, then the barrier to warming of Mars appears to be less high than previously thought.
The paper also notes that the melting of the water would also release more water vapor and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which will accelerate the warming process.
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Global map of known exposed scarps of ice on Mars. North and south of the
white hatched lines, near surface ice and glaciers are common.
Scientists have now proposed much more efficient method for warming the climate of the planet Mars by as much 50 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to melt much of the near-surface ice in the middle latitudes and thus make the planet habitable.
This new method, using engineered dust particles released to the atmosphere, could potentially warm the Red Planet by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit, to temperatures suitable for microbial life—a crucial first step towards making Mars habitable.
The proposed method is over 5,000 times more efficient than previous schemes to globally warm Mars, representing a significant leap forward in our ability to modify the Martian environment. What sets this approach apart is its use of resources readily available on Mars, making it far more feasible than earlier proposals that relied on importing materials from Earth or mining rare Martian resources.
You can read the paper here. From the abstract:
One-third of Mars’ surface has shallow-buried H2O, but it is currently too cold for use by life. Proposals to warm Mars using greenhouse gases require a large mass of ingredients that are rare on Mars’ surface. However, we show here that artificial aerosols made from materials that are readily available at Mars—for example, conductive nanorods that are ~9 micrometers long—could warm Mars >5 × 103 time smore effectively than the best gases. Such nanoparticles forward-scatter sunlight and efficiently block upwelling thermal infrared. Like the natural dust of Mars, they are swept high into Mars’ atmosphere, allowing delivery from the near-surface. For a 10-year particle lifetime, two climate models indicate that sustained release at 30 liters per second would globally warm Mars by ≳30 kelvin and start to melt the ice. Therefore, if nanoparticles can be made at scale on (or delivered to) Mars, then the barrier to warming of Mars appears to be less high than previously thought.
The paper also notes that the melting of the water would also release more water vapor and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which will accelerate the warming process.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Mars as a large scale experiment on controlling climate. Do things there first before we let Science! do it here lest we fool ourselves into thinking we make a difference when perhaps we actually do not. Like that silly ritual I do on the back deck before every sunrise. It actually makes the sun rise every time. Now I don’t dare stop!
errata: /the papter also/, very last paragraph
Fine. Even if this new methods works, how do you mediate the solar winds from blowing away whatever atmosphere you manage to engineer on Mars? Can you get ahead of that effect with mere quantity? Maybe with dust, but there is only so much water vapor to go around.
Dave in Denver: Typo fixed. Thanks.
Would be neat if engineers could create a magnetic field just as the Earth has. Would mining huge quantities of metals, then moving that material to the poles create a magnetic field?
If Ice asteroids could be dropped on Mars over time the solar winds effect could be countered at first.
But if several thousand cubic miles of water could be added inside a hundred years it would last unassisted for several thousand years.
More than long enough for humans to no longer need a second planet.
Place mirrors in orbit around Mars. Use them to heat Mars up. Mars need nitrogen. Send large balls of ammonia crashing into Mars. Might mix that up with dry ice, and water ice. Create a crater about 40 kilometers deep. Air would then rush to the bottom of the crater. Get the air pressure to about 450 millibar’s. You will not need a spacesuit down there. You will need an oxygen tank, and a mask. Also might want to wear a coat.
This reminds me of “Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson, 1992-1996.
Clark: “Even if this new methods works, how do you mediate the solar winds from blowing away whatever atmosphere you manage to engineer on Mars? Can you get ahead of that effect with mere quantity? Maybe with dust, but there is only so much water vapor to go around.”
Physicist Peter Hague in his substack Planetocracy answers that: {quoting…}
The measured loss rate of Martian atmosphere is 1-2kg per second. Each year, the UK alone emits 405 million tonnes equivalent CO2, of which 79% is actual carbon dioxide. Taking the carbon content of that alone (3/11 of the total mass) that means the UK is adding around 2,700 kg of mass to the Earth’s atmosphere per second. Replenishing Mars’ atmosphere, if necessary, would thus be fairly trivial.
{un/Quote}
As far as water goes, there’s lots of water on Mars.
What keeps the Martian water from draining deeper into the planet?
On Earth is the molten core that pushes it back up. Mars does not have this.
Water will never pool on the surface. It could hang in the air but not on the ground. Maybe as ice but not for long.
Water extraction from the atmosphere would be great if the temp could be raised enough to melt it into the atmosphere. No roads, transportation costs or pipelines to worry about. Let the atmosphere bring the water to anyone who needs it.
Garbage in, garbage out. Mars not only has a molten iron core, its lower mantle is also molten—molten rock—as this article discusses.
Q: How much would this proposal to improve the Mars atmosphere experiment cost?
$100 billion dollars? A half a trillion dollars?
And where does this long-term commitment money come from to experiment on a planet that has no appreciable magnetic field and gravity that tends to keep an atmosphere in place? Mars has no atmosphere for a reason as far as I understand.
Just curious, and I am not trying to be a stick in the mud.
Cotour: Considering the cost is of course essential. Americans stopped doing so decades ago, and it is destroying our country. As I noted to Col Beausabre in another comment, the pioneers on these worlds will decide, and because they will be pioneers, faced with death continuously in a difficult environment, they will do very good cost-benefit analyses and do whatever they can afford.
Mars also has an atmosphere.
Michael McNeil
Your article says it has a very hot iron core. possibly verging on molten. But not close enough to cause any convection or rotation that would create a magnetic field.
Which also means that the core does not have enough energy to push any fluid of any kind to the surface. Not even geothermal water gets any place close to the surface.
To get to deep subsurface liquid water you would have to go tens of miles deep.
The core of Mars is not hot enough to move or flow. So it is essentially useless. The engine of Mars is shut down.
Actually, if you read some of the articles concerning Mars’ molten iron core (together with molten lower mantle), you’ll find discussion of the fact that Earth’s core dynamo (powering its magnetic field) is energized by the continuing process offreezing Earth’s molten iron (outer) core—while on Mars that process apparently hasn’t yet even begun (it’s still too hot)—with the accompanying conclusion that the martian core dynamo hasn’t yet even gotten started, and when it does Mars might obtain a global magnetic field.
And that cooling down of the Mars core will be in 500 thousand years? 5 million years? 10 million years?
Timing in all things is EVERYTHING.
The only initial mode of transformation that seems to make sense to me would first begin with a device that would be placed in the appropriate orbit around Mars and project a long-term electromagnetic field that would shield it from the never abating radiation of the sun.
I suppose a nuclear or solar powered device? How big might it have to be?
I think without something like that or finding a plant that could be sewn all over the planet that could live under excruciating conditions that would over time reproduce and serve to transform the planet are the initial ways to begin. But that is one hell of an electromagnetic generator and that would be one hell of a plant.
That or creating an environment underground and above and slowly expand its footprint.
Either way you look at it a very big deal.
Here’s where you can find the foregoing discussion concerning the possible future magnetism of Mars. Yes, that would be far in the future. However, the described scenario of what’s now an over-hot interior of Mars (for there to be a planetary magnetic field) is basically the opposite of the (cooling and cold) Mars you were arguing for earlier.
Beyond that, I doubt that such a huge endeavor as trying to artificially generate a magnetic field for the whole planet Mars would be cost-effective. Simply don’t bother doing that. Solar radiation isn’t the principal danger to martian settlers anyway—cosmic radiation is. The (supposedly nonexistent—according to Cotour) martian atmosphere provides sufficient shielding in this regard (especially for cosmic rays incoming at a glancing angle) that habitats on Mars need not be placed wholly underground, but merely must have soil piled on the (flat) roof, while they can be open (with picture windows) at the sides. Then, if one feels like it, maybe on the side also do a little work to replenish the lost atmosphere. Voila! Mars is habitable.
“Voila! Mars is habitable.”
Yeah, voila!
Made me laugh.
Well, I will tell you one thing if the Democrats prevail in this and future political contests this entire argument over developing Mars will be entirely moot. It will never and can never be realized. Socialism cannot provide the resources nor the capitol nor the intellectual inspiration and brain power to do so.
Today’s Socialist Democrat agenda is an American Capitalist death spiral. And if America is unable to muster the resources to build on Mars it will not be done. Does anyone really think a Globalist agenda run world utopian government would be able to command a Mars transformation be accomplished?
I do not.
Think of a Space / NASA / Tech enthusiast and nerd who votes Democrat is much like an American Jew who can only justify voting Left and against everything that they declare they are allegedly about.
And have no doubt about it is now a confident hard Left and anti-American Globalist ticket.
So, vote one way and go to Mars.
Vote the other way and stay right where you are.
I will throw this in with this conversation:
“And let’s face it, the Democrat party has installed by law every single manner to cheat and pervert an election known to man in order to prevail. That is a fact that no one can deny.”
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/he-must-never-be-allowed-to-win