The Climate of Early Mars

By R. Wordsworth. 2016

367 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The nature of the early martian climate is one of the major unanswered questions of planetary science. Key challenges remain, but a new wave of orbital and in situ observations and improvements in climate modeling have led to significant advances over the past decade. Multiple lines of geologic evidence now point to an episodically warm surface during the late Noachian and early Hesperian periods 3–4 Ga. The low solar flux received by Mars in its first billion years and inefficiency of plausible greenhouse gases such as CO2 mean that the steady-state early martian climate was likely cold. A denser CO2 atmosphere would have caused adiabatic cooling of the surface and hence migration of water ice to the higher-altitude equatorial and southern regions of the planet. Transient warming caused melting of snow and ice deposits and a temporarily active hydrological cycle, leading to erosion of the valley networks and other fluvial features. Precise details of the warming mechanisms remain unclear, but impacts, vo...

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48a5c4e76dba61eb30e729b507d8cf6b8b4e3611

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

  1. R. Wordsworth
  2. E. Kite
  3. James W. Head III
  4. Bethany L. Ehlmann
  5. A. Vigasin
  6. S. Lokshtanov
  7. C. Sanders
  8. Huize Wang

In Paleontology

  1. E. Kite
  2. A. Vigasin
  3. S. Lokshtanov
  4. C. Sanders
  5. Huize Wang
  6. Yulia N. Kalugina
  7. James W. Head III
  8. Bethany L. Ehlmann

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