Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

Void · 2018-12-11 21:36:33

I try to be frugal about starting new topics.

However, here I have been thinking about solar power towers, from heliostats, and ice covered oceans. This idea is not shy.

This is an offshoot from a "Ground Engine". That would be a set of rocket engines pointing in the air, composed in a circle with methods to change their angle to the sky so in a concert to provide a catapult to help launch a rocket, or a catchers mitt to receive a load, most likely having an explosively deployed parachute (On Mars).

I reasoned that if it was a Hydrogen/Oxygen flame, of course the output would be water. Could you then orchestrate a vortex, composed of a updraft of 10,000 degrees water, and a spin. I think so. However at that temperature, most of the energy would be wasted since it would dispose of energy by radiation in to a massive extent.

However if you put other materials into the flame, you may bulk up the updraft and yet bring it's temperature down to thermal conserving characteristics. Over 800 degrees, I assume degF, 1/2 of the energy supposedly radiates off. So, maybe cooler than that.

But your objective is to inject with a vortex water vapor into the upper atmosphere of Mars. Why? Well, if you can hydrate the upper atmosphere of Mars, you then have a greenhouse gas put there. There will be two forces attempting to return it to ground. One will be condensation. However if you get high enough, it may be hard to nucleate such condensation to the extent that it can bring the water so low that it will not again vaporize and rise again on the next day time. The other is dissolution. The lower atmosphere being very dry, if you make the upper atmosphere humid, some force will attempt to bring the vapors down to the lower atmosphere.

But one thing of favor is that water vapor can be super cooled and not condense under certain situations. Of course we would want to exploit/cause those situations.

If this is accomplished, then our hope might be that the U.V. of the Martian spectrum would split the water vapor, into Oxygen and Hydrogen. The Hydrogen would be more prone to drift off into space. Still before it did, some of it might generate Methane during contact with atmospheric Carbon compounds (CO2, CO, unstable split molecules???).

But, before the Water Vapor is split, it too is a greenhouse gas.

And then if it is then split, and Hydrogen goes its way and Oxygen is preferentially left behind in the upper atmosphere, do we have chances for Ozone? Probably. I am however concerned that Ozone will react with the CO2 and CO in the atmosphere. So, not sure ozone will be stable.

…..

But it would be nice to use the method to introduce water vapor as a greenhouse gas, and to hope that the solar flux with it's U.V. would grant energy to our purposes to hope to chemically modify the situation producing Methane, a gas that is both greenhouse, and may block U.V. to some extent. I believe that Methane and Ozone are somewhat supportive of each other. Not sure.

Anyway another objective is to get Chlorine out of the Martian skies. If you inject water vapor, you just might do so.

…..

I have even so replaced the rocket engine method with a solar power tower and Ice covered Oceans

So, what if you did have these solar power towers, and they in part used their energy to melt the extensive high latitude ice into ice covered oceans? What about also just simply venting high temperature steam to the Martian sky, to create a vortex, to bring water vapor to high altitude. Of course I am imagining superheated steam, running a turbine. You don't bother to condense the steam and re-cycle it, you just dump it into a vortex.

Good enough for an speculation.

Not a shy idea.

Bold.

Ended.

Last edited by Void (2018-12-11 21:58:02)

Void · 2018-12-11 22:36:23

So, since it is highly unlikely that anyone will assist me it this, I guess I will try to be "The Little Red Hen" about it.

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/clim … e-co2.html
Quote:

t’s Water Vapor, Not the CO2
ACS Climate Science Toolkit | Narratives
Remark: “The Earth has certainly been warming since we have added so much CO2 to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning.”
Reply: “Forget the CO2. Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It controls the Earth’s temperature.”

Of course on Earth rain gets a lot of the water vapor out of the sky. On Mars not so much.

Maybe fairy dust. If that small enough, then it lingers in the sky long enough to be vaporized by the next days sun, and being much lighter than CO2 will rise even more so than on Earth. Until it has a chemical encounter with other sky chemicals and U.V.

……

Yes and No I feel stupid. Not sure I have enough about supercooled water vapor. Perhaps I have a lesson to learn, but it is late. So far I recall that without nucleation points such as dust, it is hard for snow or rain to form as mandated by temperatures.

Even so, it is not a fatal error in my thinking above. I just need to conk out. Night Night.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_physics

Have a look if you care.

Ended.

Last edited by Void (2018-12-11 22:41:32)

JoshNH4H · 2018-12-12 11:41:08

Hey Void,

On Earth, we have a lot of water in the atmosphere and not so much CO2. This means that the frequencies water absorbs are mostly blocked already, while the ones CO2 absorbs are only partially blocked. Adding additional CO2 to the atmosphere on Earth therefore has a larger marginal effect on the temperature than more water vapor.

On Mars, the situation is reversed: There's a lot of CO2 and very little water vapor. Adding water vapor to the atmosphere therefore has a bigger effect on the temperature. The problem, as you noted, is that the cold temperatures cause the water to freeze out quickly. I don't know that your suggestion of sending it up into the upper atmosphere would help all that much: My guess (which admittedly is all this is) is that it would slowly freeze into very fine ice particles that would actually cool the planet. The other thing is that you actually want your greenhouse gases to be near ground level so that they warm the part of the atmosphere where people are.

It's true that water is a greenhouse gas, but to me it's best seen as a byproduct of other interventions, because it's not much use as a greenhouse gas until the atmosphere has already warmed substantially.

Void · 2018-12-12 12:43:45

Josh,

It is very generous for you to respond. I will reply in hopes of defending or understanding truth better.

Well, of course I am also hoping for the synthesis of Methane, as U.V. breaks down H20 and CO2.

But here is one hope of keeping some water vapor suspended in the atmosphere by supercooling. Cloud seeding. It would not be something to do, if precipitation happens automatically when cold vapor is present.

http://thesecretsofscience.com/artifici … echnology/
Quote:

Often there are clouds, but no rain. This is because of a phenomenon called super cooling. The temperature of the cloud might be close to zero and there might even be crystals of ice in it.

Cloud-seeding is the attempt to change the precipitation that falls from clouds, by dispersing ‘salt’ or other chemicals into air. Usually used chemicals for the purpose of cloud seeding include dry ice, silver iodide, liquid propane and sodium chloride. Initially, clouds are identified that are apt for seeding with the help of radar. Then, aircraft disperse salts using flares or explosives in the lower portions of clouds .The salts grow in size as water joins with them and this leads to rain.

Mars is a dusty place at least in the lower atmosphere. However if you can get the vapors high enough, there may be problems for nucleation to occur. That is a hope.

……

Also, I am thinking that if the "Snow" is fairy dust, then it may not fall to the surface before the next dawn, at which point I would expect it to have a potential to vaporize rapidly again. And even if some of it does hit the ground, most will be vaporized back into the atmosphere at the next dawn.

All the time subjected to intense U.V. spectrums. (During the day).

Here is information on ice fogs at the poles:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/new … e-science/
It appears that the fogs start at the ground and move up. My intention is to put the water vapor way up there, where the atmosphere is extremely tenuous.

The triple point of water being about 0 DegC at what? about 6 mb. But what if you are at .06 mb? What cold temperature do you need then, for an ice fog condensation? And then at that altitude, will dust be suspended to nucleate the process. These are just guess numbers. To know the potential or lack of potential this would have to be looked into further.
And interesting thing about the poles is that for Mars, you could have a very long day during the summer, where perhaps condensation would not tend to occur.

……
……

But now the kicker. I really just wanted to vaporize water at a very high temperature run a turbine from a solar power tower, and generate electricity for humans to use. Dumping the output vapors to a vortex in hopes that some will get high up, is a secondary process for a hoped for method of terraforming.

I am going Cone-Ish next. You will see. Cone house solar power towers

Again more criticism is OK, but I will respond as best I can to defend what I have said. Not in anger though.

Ended

Last edited by Void (2018-12-12 13:03:07)

JoshNH4H · 2018-12-12 14:12:43

Hey Void,

The remaking of a planet is a gigantic project, orders of magnitude beyond anything humans have ever done in its scale. What this means, in my opinion, is that we need to be looking for ways to leverage our capabilities to get the planet to do much of the work for us. It's very much an open question what the best things to do are, although there have been lots of interesting ideas put out there.

To the extent that I question or challenge you idea it's because I think it's worth engaging with.

So, here we go:

Correct me if I am wrong: Your proposal is to keep the water in the upper atmosphere by condensing it into clouds, right?

Clouds are not gaseous. They are suspensions of liquid water or water ice in atmospheric gas. What this means (to the best of my understanding) is that its absorption/transmission properties in the infrared are more like water and ice. On net it's my understanding that clouds actually cool a planet because the greenhouse effect associated with them is cancelled out by the degree to which they reflect sunlight away from the planet.

Creating methane is good but at a guess (a pretty uninformed guess) the actual rates will be low. Methane has a higher global warming potential than CO2 (around 25 to 100 vs. 1 for CO2*). This is higher, but not so much higher that small amounts can make a big difference for climate. I would look towards seeding the upper atmosphere with fluorine as a better way to generate warming: CF4 is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas, with a GWP around 5,000 to 10,000 times higher than CO2.

*Global Warming Potential is a measure of how much warming comes from each tonne of gas when released into Earth's atmosphere as compared to CO2. It is a function of a lot of variables and the precise number is really only meaningful for Earth and for a specified period of time (100 years is the standard). When looking at GWP, I would group gases into four basic categories: Weaker than CO2 or negligible warming effect (Nitrogen, Oxygen, and the noble gases), similar to CO2 (CO2 and water), mildly stronger than CO2 (methane and ammonia), and much stronger than CO2 (chlorofluorocarbons etc).

Void · 2018-12-12 14:42:53

Good to have those notions in your reply.

As I suggested I have also done this:

http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8853

So, as I have refined my intentions the method could be slow and tedious. But it could be part of a life support system so maybe it does not matter. If it helps it helps. If not then you got electrical power.

But for Fluorine….where to get some??? Do if you can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine

I am not going to prance about pretending where to get Fluorine. However perhaps from salts?? If the life support system I have attached to provides access to a "Sea" that is supported by heat from solar power, then the salts of that sea may have chemicals desired, perhaps Fluorine.

So if we have a terraform party on Mars, then yes all the tools.

Ended.

Last edited by Void (2018-12-12 14:49:08)

SpaceNut · 2018-12-12 18:03:39

There is flourine as found by the little rovers so making the CF4 is a matter of mining, processing and creating to allow for possibly a balloon lift to higher altitudes for seeding the air at were we would want to start at. Since we would have a host of Mavens on orbit we will have the means to analyze what happens. The higher level of UV will break it down but since there is no Ozone layer we are fine with it doing that.

knightdepaix · 2018-12-12 20:03:23

Ozone would be a good candidate to reflect harmful to human ultraviolet rays, albeit less of which than Earth reaches Mars. Mining for metals and carbon fixation of the Martian atmosphere during the human settling effort are going to generate oxygen. Turning them to ozone is a good turning waste to useful strategy. water and oxygen in the Martian atmosphere leave Mars eventually. Would ozone too?

Void · 2018-12-12 20:04:57

Yes, nothing wrong with adding other greenhouse gasses, but I am going to defend the potential of this idea.

Some legitimate concerns such as would it produce Methane exist. That is if U.V. is shredding CO2 and H20, at a greater than normal rate, will Methane be produced? It would produce Oxygen certainly.

I believe that Oxygen and Carbon Monoxide are indeed produced.

During a global dust storm Hydrogen is emitted.

So here we go:
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8299/dust-st … tmosphere/
Quote:

Fast Facts:
Rising air during global dust storms on Mars hoists water vapor high in the atmosphere, researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter report.
Regional dust storms every year uplift water to a lesser extent and appear to drive a seasonal pattern in loss of hydrogen from the top of Mars' atmosphere.
If Mars has a global dust storm in 2018, observations could aid understanding of its effects.
"We found there's an increase in water vapor in the middle atmosphere in connection with dust storms," said Nicholas Heavens of Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia, lead author of the report in Nature Astronomy. "Water vapor is carried up with the same air mass rising with the dust."

Rising air during a 2007 global dust storm on Mars lofted water vapor into the planet's middle atmosphere, researchers learned from data derived from observations by the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Click to enlarge.
A link between the presence of water vapor in Mars' middle atmosphere -- roughly 30 to 60 miles (50 to 100 kilometers) high -- and escape of hydrogen from the top of the atmosphere has been detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, but mainly in years without the dramatic changes produced in a global dust storm. NASA's MAVEN mission arrived at Mars in 2014 to study the process of atmosphere escape.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mar … orms-water
Quote:

During one massive dust storm in 2006 and 2007, signs of water vapor were found at unusually high altitudes in the atmosphere, nearly 80 kilometers up. That water vapor rose within “rocket dust storms” — storms with rapid vertical movement — on convection currents similar to those in some storm clouds on Earth, says study coauthor Nicholas Heavens, an astronomer at Hampton University in Virginia.
At altitudes above 50 kilometers, ultraviolet light from the sun easily penetrates the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere and breaks down water’s chemical bonds between hydrogen and oxygen. Left to its own devices, hydrogen slips free into space, leaving the planet with less of a vital ingredient for water.
“Because it’s so light, hydrogen is lost relatively easily on Mars,” Heavens says. “Hydrogen loss is measurable from Earth, too, but we have so much water that it’s not a big deal.”

My comment, even though the temperatures on average rise on the surface of Mars during a global dust storm, those temperatures are still cold. However if you get higher, I have hints that the temperature elevates.

But I don't think I even need that. It comes down to injecting water vapor very high up using a vortex of water vapor. The conditions for condensation can be inhibited by low pressure:
https://www.lyotechnology.com/vapor-pressure-of-ice.cfm

For instance -82 C in the case where the air pressure is incredibly low.

And the next need is that the air be saturated with water vapor to have condensation. I believe that when no global dust storm is active, that air at such high altitudes is extremely dry, as any water vapor in it is likely to be shredded. There is very little mechanism to get water vapor up there without a Global or local dust storm.

The next thing needed is nucleation points. Maybe dust. I don't think that there will be that much of it up that high when a dust storm is not active.

And we have ice fogs. They do happen lower in the atmosphere and sometimes are seen in the rift valley. But by morning almost all of the ice fog vaporizes.

The Martian surface is notoriously stingy about dispensing water vapor to the atmosphere, but it is a bit better during global dust storms.

The poles are brutally cold, even in summer. The equator and low latitudes may hide ice below dust and dirt and rocks, but it seems evident that the atmosphere struggles to get much of it.

And then we have "The Land of the Midnight Sun" effect, except on Mars it is almost twice as long at the poles.

So, at high latitudes during the "Summers", in fact you could have a sky where the sun does not set for many months and outside of those bounds, you have relatively short nights.

And then there is a time duration before your water vapor is shredded into it's parts by U.V.

……

So, am I lame about the Methane??? Good chances. U.V. likes to slice it up also. That is a part of it that could use work. Can a way be found to enhance the production of Methane by this process??? Well, you would know over time.

Am I lame about the Hydrogen and Oxygen??? No.

So, if needed for terraforming at least Oxygen can be added to the atmosphere. Maybe to form some Ozone but I fear that it is too reactive to play nice with CO2.

…..

Anyway I again return to the idea that I want two ice covered polar seas. This is to be accomplished by interring molecular vibration under the ice. Probably by solar energy.

Civilizations need a good water supply, not a meager one. The bigger the better for the most part, as long as you are not flooded or drowned.

Vaporizing the surface of the polar caps would be relatively inefficient.

So then you have Boring company type tunnels leading to solar power towers. You also have some tunnels going back to the bodies of water pushing heat into them.

But you also vaporize a huge amount of water through turbines to generate power for your settlements. You may vent the output at a desired temperature to atmosphere in such a way to create an enormous updraft, a vortex.

Such a water vapor vortex on Earth would rise very quickly. But remember on Mars the atmosphere is 94% CO2, and maybe 6 % gasses that weight similar to Earth atmosphere. The CO2 is very heavy. Therefore I expect the water vapor updraft to rise very, very fast.

There it is, half baked, but it seems that very few people can get the notion that you have to half bake something before you can fully bake it.

And in part I am hoping to bake it with U.V. and solar turbine energy.

Finished.

Last edited by Void (2018-12-12 20:41:58)

SpaceNut · 2018-12-12 21:27:56

UV Mar O3
Scientists Discover Third Ozone Layer in Atmosphere of Mars

Ozone was detected on Mars in 1971. The ozone concentration on the planet is typically 300 times thinner than on Earth, although it varies greatly with location and time. Measurements of O3 on Mars provide significant information about the chemistry and composition of the atmosphere, including long-term changes. The most extensive and accurate data were inferred from the Mariner 9 UV spectrometer experiment.

http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/paris201 … is2011.pdf

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/ … cientists/

MEDA is a suite of environmental sensors designed to record dust optical properties and six atmospheric parameters: wind speed/direction, pressure, relative humidity, air temperature, ground temperature, and radiation in discrete bands of the UV, visible, and IR ranges of the spectrum.

UV mars CH4
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/godd … n-uv-mars/

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012LPI....43.1911S

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi … 063471.pdf

METHANE ON MARS.. Although methane is not a major gas in the Martian atmosphere, it was recently discovered venting from three areas and identified as possible evidence for life below the surface (Krasnopolsky et al. 2004).

louis · 2018-12-13 02:14:48

My understanding of water vapour on Earth is that we don't know whether it is a greenhouse gas viewed in the round. While water vapour traps heat, for sure, it also has an albedo effect, reflecting back solar insolation. The best guess seems to be that the net effect is either marginally negative or positive.

I am always amazed how little interested climate scientists seem in water vapour compared with CO2 emissions. Irrigation schemes cover huge areas on the planet now and the net effect is that water bodies that didn't previously exist, prior to the mid 20th century say are exposed to evaporation (whereas formerly the water would have been contained in the rivers and oceans) in very hot areas of the planet. The net effect must be to pump trillions of tons of water into the atmosphere that would not have been there 100 years ago.

JoshNH4H · 2018-12-13 10:20:31

My understanding is that removing all the water in the atmosphere would result in a substantially cooler planet, but the marginal effect of additional water vapor is up for debate. Water also tends to have a pretty short lifetime in the atmosphere, falling as rain or snow in a short time.

As far as irrigation and the like goes, that may have some effect on local weather if done at a large scale but I don't think it has a very significant effect on the global climate.

As far as where to get fluorine: Most fluorine reserves on Earth take the form of fluorite, CaF2. Here's the series of reactions you would use to produce CF4 from that:

CaF2 + H2SO4 -> CaSO4 + 2 HF

Then, you have two options. Option 1:

4 HF + C -> CF4 + 2 H2 (in an electrolytic cell admixed with KF)

Option 2:

2 HF -> H2 + F2 (in an electrolytic cell admixed with KF)

2 F2 + CO2 -> CF4 + O2

Neither of these is easy per se, but CF4 is such an effective greenhouse gas that the temperature return on doing this is pretty high.

Void · 2018-12-13 12:38:57

Josh, that looks good. No harm in looking at a pinch of super greenhouse gasses. My preference is to get the materials from mining water, such as newly thawed seas, or brine aquifers. I just prefer to work with fluids. Mining would be a bitch on Mars. As you will see, I will dispute your assertions on water vapor as it does not in my opinion think on the nature of water vapor in a solution of air.

Louis. Actually good thinking, but water vapor is not clouds or fog. Clouds and fog are a slurry of air with liquid or solid particles made primarily of water (Or CO2 on Mars sometimes). But you are very close to good things I feel. You have added something of value indeed.

On Mars you are likely to have two forms of visible water. Solid water in the air as clouds or fog, and surface deposits such as ice, snow, or frost.

Water vapor is for the most part invisible to the human eye, but is considered a greenhouse gas as it blocks some wavelengths of infrared I believe. So do CO2, and Methane.

So if we could have more of water vapor in the atmosphere, and more of CO2 in the atmosphere, and more of Methane, and then throw in some more exotic types of greenhouse gas that should be useful. If we can increase the number of molecules into the Martian atmosphere also, by releasing Oxygen from water, I would think we would like that. If we can get some kind of useful Ozone layer from the Oxygen, then I like that. Ideally enough Ozone to allow really rugged life, but not so much that it robs us entirely of the energy potential of U.V. on the surface of Mars.

OK, I am going to use shifty tricks, but it is for the good. I previous recall an article I posted about water vapor getting up as high as 80 Kilometers from dust storms on Mars. There the environment of U.V. is very hostile to the molecule, and tends to split it. So if we want Oxygen and hope for Ozone this could be a good target.

There is a nice graph here in this link that shows a atmospheric column temperature profile.
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C070 … zalezG.pdf

About 110 and 80 Kilometers seem to be the two lowest temperatures in the atmosphere (I presume on average). Yet the dust storms can get enough water vapor up there to do a significant deed, that is split water.

So for that we are in the Mesosphere.

If we could get water vapor up into the Thermosphere, the temperatures go up seriously. But that is probably more of a grunt that we can or would wish to bother with. But is a thing to consider later.

I think that the upper Troposphere and the lower Mesosphere are possible targets for inserting water vapor.

Upper atmospheres in general do not have saturation of water vapor. My thinking is that they are like a dry sponge. More water vapor could be dissolved into them, but before it gets up there, it does precipitate. You can argue that the air is dry because it is thin and cold. But the reality is it does not rain every day where I live, and the RH% is not 100 percent every day, so I can believe that if I had a way of inserting more water vapor into the atmosphere to dissolve into it, rain will not happen until it gets very close to saturation.

I can then add more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere by adding water vapor. Up to the maximum the atmosphere will hold into a solution.

…..

This then brings things back to some of the materials of Louis, on Clouds and I will say fogs. Mostly ice fogs I presume, and although super cooled rain might happen on Mars, I will presume the clouds to be of ice crystals as well. In both cases very fine ice crystals held in suspension in a slurry of Martian air and ice crystals.

In a way I feel that Louis has provided another associated tool.

There are two kinds of water particulate fogs I can think of on Mars. Night fogs, and polar hoods.

Night fogs sometimes in the Valles Marineris A picture is in this link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valles_Marineris

It is hard to find a picture of the Martian polar hoods, as I suppose that they are primarily in the dark in the winters of Mars.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com … 09JE003554
Quote:

1. Introduction
[2] Polar hoods are cloud zones that develop over the polar cap during late summer and persist through winter, sometimes into early spring [Leovy et al., 1972]. The spatial and temporal extent of the south polar hood on Mars and the processes that create it are not well known. Early ground‐based telescopic observations of the south polar hood were impaired by Mars being tilted away from Earth during the fall and winter seasons in the respective Martian hemispheres. The limited observations that were made led to the conclusion that the southern hood forms only after midwinter (LS = 135°) [Martin et al., 1992]. James et al. [1990] detected extensive circumpolar condensate clouds between LS = 191° and LS = 210° with ground based telescopic observations. Spacecraft observations from Mariner 9 and Viking orbiters were quite limited during the fall and winter seasons when the south polar hood is visible [James et al., 1992].

Anyway at night, and in winter, clouds and fogs likely help to keep the planet Mars warmer than it might otherwise be.

So, for Mars, (In my opinion), we like clouds at night and in winter, we do not like clouds in daytime or summer.

So, if we are going to attempt to terraform using water vapor and cloud/fog slurries, we want so much and no more to be injected into the Martian atmosphere. We do not prefer clouds and fogs in the day or summer, and we do not want to paint the ground white with snow, unless we have an ozone layer, and hope to water very hardy photo life forms on the surface. We certainly do not want to increase permanent snow/ice pack.
……

The method I proposed expels some water into the atmosphere as a byproduct of solar power towers being used to spin turbines with water steam. This terraform method is a byproduct of life support. So, rather than consuming consumables to do terraforming, we could hope to create consumables by terraforming. The consumable of importance here likely to be energy for humans and their machines to use. You could say that we would be polluting the Martian atmosphere with "Stack" water vapor, instead of as on Earth with CO2. Both for the desire to capture solar energy from the sun with water vapor, and also to retain ground thermal energy by appropriately scheduled clouds and fogs.

While polluting the Martian skies with water to generate electricity is an amusing idea, we also can dump solar heat into the ice covered sea, and generate power by quenching steam into water, and returning the warmed water to the seal.

And then possibly the water taken back from the sea will contain salts with Fluorine, for what Josh wants.

……

But what about Methane? Well perhaps high sky Methane will be hard to come by, but I have a different plan.

OK, in....Post #42, of;
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7150&p=2
A chance to eat the atmosphere of Mars.

Nothing ventured, no bullies can hurt me maybe. Or lets just hide.

Anyway we try to go down the chemosynthesis route, to get Methane. Maybe the atmosphere of Mars will give us quantities of CO, and maybe we have microbes in the artificial sea we create that don't mind living off of CO and H2O and so producing Methane which we release to the atmosphere.

So, by now if we are really fortunate, we have a method to increase temperatures, and perhaps get the solid forms of CO2 to vaporize.

…..

But before you do that, consider that you may have an sea/ocean at each pole where you could vaporize dry ice in water to produce energy. Energy in the winter!

……

But if I were a Martian, with seasons being almost twice as long as Earth, I think I would prefer to mothball the pole that was going into winter and ride a hyperloop to the other pole that was going into summer. Repeatedly, and always.

Watcha Got?

Ended.

Last edited by Void (2018-12-13 13:53:14)

Void · 2018-12-13 19:05:27

I will give you my perspective.

I see our current effort as to strike a spark on Mars to kindle a small flame. Here we must be humble, seek the most likely place on Mars where a small flame of humanity could begin. And that will not be the poles in my opinion.

But per the previous post, beyond a initial flame it must be done that we seek a major hearthplace on Mars, and in my opinion that would point to the polar ice caps, via mid latitude ice deposits.

Given the accomplishment of that, where potentially you have a biosphere operating (With human and mechanical assistance) under the bodies of water which could exist at each pole, and just maybe terrestrial life very enduring of U.V. on the soil surface, then you can think about your green Mars or even blue Mars.

I will be long dead so do what you want. I could not stop you living or dead anyway.

Done

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#1 2018-12-11 21:36:33

Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#2 2018-12-11 22:36:23

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#3 2018-12-12 11:41:08

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#4 2018-12-12 12:43:45

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#5 2018-12-12 14:12:43

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#6 2018-12-12 14:42:53

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#7 2018-12-12 18:03:39

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#8 2018-12-12 20:03:23

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#9 2018-12-12 20:04:57

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#10 2018-12-12 21:27:56

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#11 2018-12-13 02:14:48

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#12 2018-12-13 10:20:31

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#13 2018-12-13 12:38:57

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

#14 2018-12-13 19:05:27

Re: Water as a greenhouse gas and source of Methane and Ozone possibly.

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