Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

soph · 2003-02-13 19:53:32

It seems that ther is very little CO2 on Mars, and a lot of water. According to space.com, this means that we can have oceans, but no terraforming of an atmosphere! I would hope that this is not the case, but if there's no CO2 to work with, is an atmosphere that allows a temperate and breathable Mars possible?

Josh Cryer · 2003-02-13 20:01:11

Why not? Just drop nitrate rich comets into the atmosphere or whatever.

I don't think there is enough CO2 there currently to make it so that the oceans can melt in the first place. You need a fairly thick atmosphere to get water to melt.

Making Mars have a large oxygen atmopshere is out of the question, since we have the issue of instant oxidation or whatever. So we would have to import gas from somewhere.

RobertDyck · 2003-02-14 09:01:27

Ironic; people used to think there was reasonable CO2 and very little water. Now the gamma ray spectrometer has measured epithermal neutrons reflected off Mars to determine the quantity of hydrogen in the top 1 metre of soil. The result shows a substantial quantity of water. But do not forget the dry ice cap at the winter pole. This dry ice migrates from which ever pole is experiencing spring to the one experiencing autumn. The seasonal CO2 movement is one of the causes of global dust storms. But realize just how much CO2 is in that dry ice cap. There is probably also dry ice mixed in the regolith, and CO2 dissolved in the regolith. I tried to recommend at the 4th Canadian Space Exploration Workshop a mission that would include atmospheric instruments to measure the total quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere and total mass of dry ice at the same time, in the same satellite. Since Mars atmosphere is 95.32% CO2, atmospheric CO2 measurements really mean the total atmosphere. Furthermore, instruments with sufficient fidelity could measure increasing density and atmospheric movement indicating introduction of CO2 gas from a source. Comparing those sources to reduction in dry ice could identify sublimation. However, I'm expecting to find locations where a CO2 sink off-gasses without a visible dry ice source. That could identify CO2 dissolved in the soil.

I presented this suggestion as measuring the total CO2 budget for the planet Mars. Some of the atmospheric scientists at the 4CSEW did recognise this as valid data for an atmospheric model, but most dismissed it as a project for terraformation. They treat terraforming as fantasy. I tried to argue that the public wants to see work on terraforming and the scientists want data for global weather modelling, and measurement of the total CO2 budget would fulfill both requirements. In fact the conference organizer from the Canadian Space Agency wanted something that would spark the public's interest to gain political support. However, the scientists did not understand the political practicality of this; they just see any work toward terraforming as laughable. Well, at least one guy who specializes in Synthetic Aperture Radar got interested in the challenge to measure the depth and density of dry ice on Mars surface.

Josh Cryer · 2003-02-14 09:22:41

Hmm, GRS can't measure how much total CO2 is there? That's surprising to me, I was under the impression that it could basically identify most of the common elements (oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, etc).

The winter ice caps are composed mostly of CO2. I've noticed that as the southern residual ice cap shrinks (there was talk of Mars global warming before), that it seems the north winter cap gets bigger. Perhaps I'm just reading the graphs wrong, but if this is true, wouldn't it indicate that Mars is lacking the, well, punch to really get its atmosphere fully gaseous?

http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/snow_paper.html

It's actually disappointing that scientists wouldn't want to have a CO2 model of the planet. I honestly don't see how that relates to terraformation. Hell, some could argue that finding water is ?a project for terraformation!?

soph · 2003-02-14 13:56:22

Water is necessary, but CO2 is needed to form an atmosphere-so CO2 is necessary for terraformation.

In fact, even if you had oodles and oodles of water, you may still need CO2 to get Mars warm enough to get it as liquid.

According to the newest articles, both polar caps are almost completely water, with very little CO2.

Adrian · 2003-02-14 15:21:29

Here are two links on the subject: SpaceDaily and BBC News.

Tyr · 2003-02-14 15:28:57

Ok, so now we have plenty of water. Then there are those strange superoxides in the soil. How much oxygen would the soil release if we warmed it and hit it with water? Of course, how do you get it warm enough to melt water ice without all the CO2 to greenhouse the planet-I say we need to produce super greenhouse gases like sulfur hexafluoride that have far higher heat trapping ability than CO2, and maybe a giant reflector in orbit. Where there is a will there is a way as long as no physical laws are violated. Have you even seem this: http://www.space.com/science....13.html I think it is kinda stupid to oppose terraforming. I advocate cloning to. Overcoming the poltically correct opposition will be harder than anything.

Josh Cryer · 2003-02-14 17:21:09

Interesting, this topic is the current news on /.

You only need a little CO2, I feel nitrogen is much much better. In any case, though, we want something as similar to Earth's atmosphere as possible. Greenhouse gasses are an option, though, and would actually probably be necessary for Mars.

I don't like the idea of a reflector. Like Sax, I would rather have a more natural, less dependent form of terraformation. What happens as the reflector degrades? Unecessary upkeep, really. Plus, the thing would have to be quite huge. Nah, not a nice idea, in my mind.

Shaun Barrett · 2003-02-14 19:40:21

I'm not panicking about the CO2 inventory on Mars just yet. This latest research certainly seems to put severe limits on the amount of CO2 in the visible south cap, but how far does the cap extend under dust and regolith beyond its visible boundary?
There are very many unknowns which are difficult to study from orbit - while manned missions would quickly multiply our knowledge many times beyond its present level. Multiple test-drillings, to depths of hundreds of metres, at dozens of sites at high northern and southern latitudes, may well be the only way to assess the full extent of frozen volatiles.

In any event, even when the visible south cap was assumed to be largely frozen CO2, its contribution to a proposed 'new atmosphere' for Mars was never going to be all that spectacular! I've read various estimates for the barometric effect of subliming the whole cap, from 30 millibars to about 100 millibars - with 50 millibars being considered a reasonable guesstimate.
As others have mentioned in this thread, the lion's share of any future Martian atmosphere was always going to be derived from CO2 adsorbed onto the regolith or otherwise sequestered in the crustal material. Estimates for the amount stored in this way have been put at anywhere from 250 to 800 millibars (and occasionally higher).

So this latest data, even if it proves to be accurate, is definitely no show-stopper for terraformation ... yet!

Hi Tyr! Just climbing back onto my trusty soap-box for a minute! In 1977, Dr. Gilbert Levin's Labeled Release (LR) experiments on the Viking landers produced results consistent with the discovery of micro-organisms in the Martian soil. The results were dismissed as the result of exotic soil chemistry because another experiment on Viking, the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GCMS), repeatedly registered no organic material in the soil at all. 'How could you have bacteria in the soil if there's not a trace of organic material?'
So, enormously inventive and imaginative exotic soil chemistries were conjured up to explain the results of the LR experiment - including the superoxides you mention in your post.
Since Viking, Dr. Levin and his collaborators have shown conclusively that the GCMS sent to Mars was completely inadequate to detect the amount of organic material in soils containing only small populations of organisms. In fact, it has been shown that the GCMS used required organic material equivalent to that from 10,000,000 micro-organisms to get a response. Certain soil samples, taken from Antarctica's dry valleys here on Earth, were shown by the same type of GCMS as was sent to Mars on Viking, to be devoid of organic material - yet these soils were found to have living colonies of bacteria in them!!
In contrast to the appalling lack of sensitivity of the GCMS, the LR experiment would detect as few as 50 bacteria in a soil sample!
In addition, heat sterilised Martian soil failed to respond to the LR experiment - as expected if biology was involved, but NOT as expected if soil chemistry were the cause of the results!
In fact, no model of exotic soil chemistry devised by scientists since Viking, has been able to explain the LR results. And all the superoxides conjured up depend, initially, on the natural production of large quantities of hydrogen peroxide in the Martian atmosphere. There is no evidence at all for large amounts of H2O2 remaining stable in the Martian environment - in fact, atmospheric models predict it would be destroyed faster than it is created!

My opinion, based on what I have gleaned from considerable reading, is that the evidence for extant Martian life is extremely compelling. Exotic soil chemistry is neither possible nor required to explain the Viking results. Occam's razor dictates that we accept the simplest direct explanation for our experimental results. That explanation, based on what we have so far, is that Mars is alive today.

If we accept that notion, then we're compelled to ask why NASA appears to have closed the book on living organisms on Mars. Dr. Levin, simply for stating his opinion at the end of one of his lectures, that his LR device had provided evidence for life in the Martian soil, was made a 'non person' by NASA. Thereafter, he had great difficulty in getting papers published and in getting funding for research - in other words, he was black-balled.
Personally, I don't understand why NASA has behaved in this way. But it's as though somebody, or some group, within NASA prefers to depict Mars as a dead world for reasons of their own.
???

dickbill · 2003-02-17 10:41:03

Hi all,

Since Mars is full of water, would it be possible to install huge Microwave generators on Phobos or Deimos to slowly warm the ice on Mars, orbit after orbit ?

Everybody knows that microwave cooking is crap so I am afraid the martians would feel a little bit like a turkey in the oven, so If we cannot direct the microwave flux on the poles, the martians there would have to be protected from the Deimos passage of top of their head.

Gennaro of Scandinavia · 2003-02-17 20:30:02

Personally, I don't understand why NASA has behaved in this way. But it's as though somebody, or some group, within NASA prefers to depict Mars as a dead world for reasons of their own.

Maybe NASA would feel that living planet would interfer too much with various settlement plans? Nah, just joking.

A rather overzealous and stretched commitment to the principle that 'extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof', I would be prepared to accept as a quite plausible explanation.

Let's hope the Beagle 2 probe, to be launched on ESA's Mars Express Mission in June this year, will give us the definitive answers.

Shaun Barrett · 2003-03-18 02:13:34

This latest "let's run Mars down" thing gets more and more interesting all the time.
As you all know, we've had one or two pessimistic articles about Mars just recently. You'll remember the finding that the south polar cap is mostly water ice (see above, in this thread), which caused tut-tutting about the negative implications for terraforming - miles and miles of water but no CO2 to build an atmosphere! But nobody bothered to point out that it was always going to be the regolith, much more than the polar cap, which would provide the bulk of the CO2 - a very convenient omission!

Then there was the recent assertion that the radiation environment 'at Mars' was very bad. The principal investigator for the Martian radiation environment experiment, Dr. Cary Zeitlin, is quoted as saying: "The Martian radiation environment experiment has confirmed expectations that future human explorers of Mars will face significant long-term health risks from space radiation."
Note the ambiguity of that statement. It fails to differentiate between radiation levels in orbit around Mars and radiation levels on the ground. Our own very valuable New Mars member, Robert Dyck, over at 'Human Missions - Mars radiation a serious risk to astronauts', has given us links which very clearly show the truth. While astronauts in orbit around Mars will be exposed to radiation levels over 2.5 times as great as ISS astronauts, Martian explorers on the ground will, on average and depending on altitude, receive only half as much radiation as the ISS astronauts get!
Isn't it interesting how 'the truth and nothing but the truth' can suffer in the absence of 'the whole truth'!! ???

Now I've discovered a fascinating glimpse into the mentality of Dr. Philip Christensen at this site.
Dr. Christensen is the principal investigator for Odyssey's thermal emission imaging system and hails from Arizona State University.
He is quoted as saying: "A wonderful surprise has been the discovery of a layer of olivine-rich rock exposed in the walls of Ganges Chasm. Olivine is easily destroyed by liquid water, so its presence in these ancient rocks suggests that this region of Mars has been very dry for a very long time."
"A wonderful surprise"?!! He sounds pretty pleased to be reporting that Mars has been bone dry for ages, doesn't he? Ganges Chasma is one of the low-lying areas of Mars, an area which should be prone to flooding. So, if Ganges has been dry for ages, then most of Mars must also have been dry. And Dr. Christensen is very happy to say so!
I wonder why?

Hmmm. Not enough air available to terraform Mars. Too much radiation for humans to dare go there. It's been bone dry for so long now that life must be unlikely, right?

Just before I check into the nearest mental health clinic for professional evaluation, in a bid to rule out paranoia as part of my problem, is anyone else seeing a pattern in these press releases?!
Or is it just me?

dickbill · 2003-03-18 07:15:40

Hi Shaun,

I don't think that this "pattern" is suggested to deny the necessity for a manned flight to Mars and save a lot of money.

About CO2, I also read from the same site than there might be much less CO2 than expected in the regolith.
In absence of CO2, where to get the volatils to make the atmosphere ?

In one the Viking experiments, when the regolith was mixed with water, oxygen was produced. Probably an oxydo-reduction reaction with the superoxyes inside the regolith. So, if Mars was fllooded again, a lot of O2 would be produced. To make the initial warming, just more fluorocarbons would be necessary.
Mars is rich in fluor. Would it be possible to find bed of fluorite fluoroapatites or other fluor containing crystals ?
With H20, we could produce fluorhydric acid HF, one of the ingredient to make CF4 and more complex molecules of this type. But where to find the carbon now ?, compressed atmospheric CO2 maybe, but there must be some sources of non oxydized carbon somewhere, say from a chondrous meteorite burried deep underground and which carbon would be readily available to combine with HF. ..lets hope the best for Mars terraformers. I forget sulfur, this compound integraded in (CF)n is an even more powerful greeenhousing gaz and luckily Mars also contains plenty of sulfur/sulfates.

dicktice · 2003-03-18 09:20:11

How about us? We can live and thrive as long as there is water, and we already know how to produce all the greenhouse gases required. Just do what comes naturally, given a few generations of Earthling enterprise on Mars. (Only half-joking.)

Josh Cryer · 2003-03-18 11:28:28

Hmm, Shaun, I dunno. I would think that anything that didn't meet a scientists expectations would be a ?wonderful surprise.?

I hope you're not wearing your tin foil hat again. :;):

soph · 2003-03-23 08:39:56

Whenever a tree, plant, or animal dies, it releases carbon. No plant is 100% efficient, either. And we only need trace amounts of CO2 to balance the temperature.

So tell me, on Earth, why hasn't all the greenhouse gases disappeared, and been replaced by O2? It's saturated with plant life.

soph · 2003-03-23 10:28:34

Yep. And I can say that plants are still everywhere.

Our atmosphere is 20% oxygen, and >1% CO2. Mars probably had liquid water at one point, for a long period of time, which means that it must have been temperate.

dicktice · 2003-03-23 13:36:36

Soph: Getting a little too deep for me. Think I'll stick to the good old "covered-ravine habitat" scheme for easy living on Mars, and leave "terraforming" to you young types to argue about. So from now on, I mean to concentrate on what's do-able in the not-too-far-future....

Bill White · 2003-03-23 14:06:20

Soph: Getting a little too deep for me. Think I'll stick to the good old "covered-ravine habitat" scheme for easy living on Mars, and leave "terraforming" to you young types to argue about. So from now on, I mean to concentrate on what's do-able in the not-too-far-future....

Hear! Hear! or is that Here! Here! ??

That elliptical orbit business pretty much rules out open air terraforming, IMHO - but with all the deep canyons and ravines, there still is plenty of room for well engineered semi- open air environments.

Just adjust the theromstat depending on the season.

Echus_Chasma · 2003-03-23 15:47:24

How much more elliptical is Mars' orbit compared to Earth?
I pretty sure that when Earth is closer to the sun during the northern winter/southern summer, the mean temperature compared to when earth is at aperihelion is not really effected at all.

soph · 2003-03-23 19:06:43

Mars has enough water for oceans too.

A 26% variation? You mean, from, say, freezing to room temperature? Wow, that's pretty huge.

So, if Mars receives 50% less light, why does it need 99% more CO2? Forgive me, it just doesn't make much sense.

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#1 2003-02-13 19:53:32

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#2 2003-02-13 20:01:11

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#3 2003-02-14 09:01:27

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#4 2003-02-14 09:22:41

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#5 2003-02-14 13:56:22

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#6 2003-02-14 15:21:29

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#7 2003-02-14 15:28:57

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#8 2003-02-14 17:21:09

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#9 2003-02-14 19:40:21

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#10 2003-02-17 10:41:03

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#11 2003-02-17 20:30:02

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#12 2003-03-18 02:13:34

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

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Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

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Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

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#16 2003-03-23 08:39:56

Re: Water, not CO2 - Bad for terraformers?

#17 2003-03-23 10:28:34

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#18 2003-03-23 13:36:36

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