The geological and climatological case for a warmer and wetter early Mars
By R. Ramirez, R. Craddock. Nature Geoscience, 2018
151 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The climate of early Mars remains a topic of intense debate. Ancient terrains preserve landscapes consistent with stream channels, lake basins and possibly even oceans, and thus the presence of liquid water flowing on the Martian surface 4 billion years ago. However, despite the geological evidence, determining how long climatic conditions supporting liquid water lasted remains uncertain. Climate models have struggled to generate sufficiently warm surface conditions given the faint young Sun—even assuming a denser early atmosphere. A warm climate could have potentially been sustained by supplementing atmospheric CO2 and H2O warming with either secondary greenhouse gases or clouds. Alternatively, the Martian climate could have been predominantly cold and icy, with transient warming episodes triggered by meteoritic impacts, volcanic eruptions, methane bursts or limit cycles. Here, we argue that a warm and semi-arid climate capable of producing rain is most consistent with the geological and climatological evidence.A warm and semi-arid climate may be most consistent with geological evidence for flowing water on the surface of early Mars, despite the challenges of warming Mars under a faint young Sun.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7af9ba54055d398d854f15c9818e5fab42bd20da
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Geologic Constraints on Early Mars Climate (2018, background): “Some workers assert that the softened appearance of ancient crater rims implies rainfall (Craddock & Lorenz 2017, Ramirez & Craddock 2018).”