Exploring the faint young Sun problem and the possible climates of the Archean Earth with a 3‐D GCM

By B. Charnay, Francois Forget, R. Wordsworth, J. Leconte, Ehouarn Millour, Francis Codron, A. Spiga. 2013

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Different solutions have been proposed to solve the “faint young Sun problem,” defined by the fact that the Earth was not fully frozen during the Archean despite the fainter Sun. Most previous studies were performed with simple 1‐D radiative convective models and did not account well for the clouds and ice‐albedo feedback or the atmospheric and oceanic transport of energy. We apply a global climate model (GCM) to test the different solutions to the faint young Sun problem. We explore the effect of greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4), atmospheric pressure, cloud droplet size, land distribution, and Earth's rotation rate. We show that neglecting organic haze, 100 mbar of CO2 with 2 mbar of CH4 at 3.8 Ga and 10 mbar of CO2 with 2 mbar of CH4 at 2.5 Ga allow a temperate climate (mean surface temperature between 10°C and 20°C). Such amounts of greenhouse gases remain consistent with the geological data. Removing continents produces a warming lower than +4°C. The effect of rotation rate is even more limited. Larger droplets (radii of 17 μm versus 12 μm) and a doubling of the atmospheric pressure produce a similar warming of around +7°C. In our model, ice‐free water belts can be maintained up to 25°N/S with less than 1 mbar of CO2 and no methane. An interesting cloud feedback appears above cold oceans, stopping the glaciation. Such a resistance against full glaciation tends to strongly mitigate the faint young Sun problem.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6cee2a672b74d186dbf235d31333cfe9bc6204ad

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. E. Wolf
2. F. Selsis
3. J. Leconte
4. M. Gudel
5. Francois Forget
6. É. Bolmont
7. L. Kaltenegger
8. T. Robinson

In Paleontology

1. A. Zerkle
2. E. Schwieterman

Citations in the corpus

• Modeling climate diversity, tidal dynamics and the fate of volatiles on TRAPPIST-1 planets (2017, background): “…it has been extensively used to study a broad range of (exo)planetary atmospheres (Wordsworth et al. 2011; Forget et al. 2013; Wordsworth et al. 2013; Charnay et al. 2013; Leconte et al. 2013a,b; Wordsworth et al. 2015; Charnay et al. 2015a,b; Bolmont et al. 2016; Turbet et al. 2016, 2017a,b).”
• The habitability of Proxima Centauri b II. Possible climates and Observability (2016, background): “Low irradiated planets as Early Mars (Forget et al. 2013; Wordsworth et al. 2013, 2015; Turbet et al. 2016b), Archean Earth (Charnay et al. 2013), Snowball Earth-like planets (Turbet et al. 2016a) or exoplanets like Gliese 581d (Wordsworth et al. 2011); 2.”
• Origin and evolution of the atmospheres of early Venus, Earth and Mars (2018, background): “…Gyr ago (e.g., Kasting et al. 1984b; Mojzsis et al. 1996; Rosing and Frei 2004; Valley et al. 2002; Güdel 2007; Feulner 2012, and references therein; Charnay et al. 2013; Wolf and Toon 2013; Kunze et al. 2014) and that, as mentioned above, liquid water on the surface of Earth has most likely…”
• Pale Orange Dots: The Impact of Organic Haze on the Habitability and Detectability of Earthlike Exoplanets (2016, background): “…have suggested planets like early Earth with global average temperatures down to 250 K can still maintain stable open ocean waters near the equator (Charnay et al. 2013), so this cold temperature can still be considered “habitable” as the planet could still support liquid water at the surface.”