The Press Stories
Excessive flying ice clouds may have caused the greenhouse effect, which kept Mars warm enough to allow water to flow over its surface.
NASA’s recently landed Mars exploration, Perseverance, has fully revealed to us one of the great mysteries of modern space exploration: Mars stands on a planet today near the ancient river delta, and it has dried up in the dust. This obvious contradiction has given scientists something to think about for decades, especially since the time when real rivers rolled over the surface of Mars, the red planet received less than a third of the sun’s rays we experience on Earth today.
Edwin Guide, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago and professor of geophysics and an expert on extraterrestrial climate, has now come up with a computer model that provides a good explanation for the mystery:
The sky of Mars may be covered with a thin layer of ice, resulting in a greenhouse effect.
“The visible evidence of the ancient Martian climate is contrary to our physical and chemical knowledge,” Guide said. “This theory is, to our knowledge, a significant step towards closing this gap.”
Scientists have already tried a variety of explanations, but none of them actually work. For example, there were those who suggested that a giant asteroid collision could release kinetic energy that would heat up the planet. However, others’ calculations show that such an effect could last for a year or two, while traces of ancient rivers and lakes on Mars suggest that warming should last at least several centuries.
Kite and colleagues came up with another hypothesis of competition:
One that explains how Mars warms up with high atmospheric clouds like the Earth circus.
Even very small clouds can significantly raise the temperature of a planet with a greenhouse effect similar to the re-emission of atmospheric carbon dioxide heat from space.
The idea first came to light in 2013, but was quickly pushed aside because, as Guide put it, “the argument at the time was that clouds must have had impossible properties for that theory to work.” The models showed, for example, that water he had to stay in the atmosphere for a long time – much longer than usual on Earth – so the whole scene seemed unbelievable.
In his bag with the three-dimensional model of the atmosphere of the entire planet, Kite and his crew resumed calculations. Once that is done, the amount of snow on the missing connection surface. If a significant part of the surface of Mars were covered with ice, it would have created moisture near the surface which is favorable for low clouds. However, low-flying clouds not only warm up, but also cool the planet because they reflect incoming solar radiation. On the other hand, if the surface is covered only by ice such as corners and mountain peaks, the surface air layers may be much drier.
Such conditions, on the other hand, favor favorable atmospheric cloud formation, and higher clouds have a greater warming effect.
The results teach us that we need to get rid of some of the assumptions we have generalized in terms of our own planet. “The clouds in the model behave in a very ‘unusual’ way,” Guide warns. “If we try to create a model based on the intuition designed by the terrain conditions, we are running in a blind orbit because the water cycle of Mars may have been completely different than on Earth, where water rotates rapidly between the atmosphere and the atmosphere.”
As almost three-quarters of our planet’s surface is covered by water, water flows rapidly and unevenly between the oceans, the atmosphere, and the earth: it spins and vice versa, so some places, such as the Sahara, become permanently dry, while others, such as the Amazon, provide abundant water. Mars, on the other hand, carried relatively little liquid water to its surface, even in its most habitable state. When water vapor was released into the atmosphere, it remained there for a long time. Our model suggests that once water is expelled into the atmosphere, it stays there for a long time – almost a year – and this is what is needed to form high atmospheric clouds for a long time. The researcher explained.
There are several options for the diligent Mars who recently landed to verify this assumption. For example, you can reconstruct past atmospheric pressure by analyzing gravel. Scientists point out that if we understand how Mars lost heat and atmosphere, we could easily search for other worlds that could inhabit the universe.
“Mars is important because it is the only planet we know of – even if only temporarily – with favorable conditions for life,” Guide finally added. – The long-term stability of the Earth’s climate is significant. We want to know all the ways in which a planet’s long-term stable climate can be distressing, not just the Earth’s specific ways – all the ways to maintain this stability. “
