Comparison of “warm and wet” and “cold and icy” scenarios for early Mars in a 3‐D climate model
By R. Wordsworth, L. Kerber, R. Pierrehumbert, Francois Forget, James W. Head III. 2015
215 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We use a 3‐D general circulation model to compare the primitive Martian hydrological cycle in “warm and wet” and “cold and icy” scenarios. In the warm and wet scenario, an anomalously high solar flux or intense greenhouse warming artificially added to the climate model are required to maintain warm conditions and an ice‐free northern ocean. Precipitation shows strong surface variations, with high rates around Hellas basin and west of Tharsis but low rates around Margaritifer Sinus (where the observed valley network drainage density is nonetheless high). In the cold and icy scenario, snow migration is a function of both obliquity and surface pressure, and limited episodic melting is possible through combinations of seasonal, volcanic, and impact forcing. At surface pressures above those required to avoid atmospheric collapse (∼0.5 bar) and moderate to high obliquity, snow is transported to the equatorial highland regions where the concentration of valley networks is highest. Snow accumulation in the Aeolis quadrangle is high, indicating an ice‐free northern ocean is not required to supply water to Gale crater. At lower surface pressures and obliquities, both H2O and CO2 are trapped as ice at the poles and the equatorial regions become extremely dry. The valley network distribution is positively correlated with snow accumulation produced by the cold and icy simulation at 41.8∘ obliquity but uncorrelated with precipitation produced by the warm and wet simulation. Because our simulations make specific predictions for precipitation patterns under different climate scenarios, they motivate future targeted geological studies.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac05caff314893e906496fa8f92665a721e9f36b
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Citations in the corpus
- 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.”
- Geologic Constraints on Early Mars Climate (2018, background): “…that can be used as input or test data for numerical models, both of Mars climate and also of Mars climate evolution (e.g. Armstrong et al. 2004, Wordsworth et al. 2015, von Paris et al. 2015, Manning et al. 2006, Kurahashi-Nakamura & Tajika 2006, Hu et al. 2015, Pham & Karatekin 2016,…”
- 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 Climate of Early Mars (2016, methodology): “Radiativeconvective calculations using the model described in Wordsworth & Pierrehumbert (2013) indicate that a 1 M⊕ planet at Mars’ orbit with an atmosphere dominated by CO2 and H2O would have a surface temperature of 288 K for an atmospheric pressure of around 3-5 bar – a small amount in…”
- The Surface UV Environment on Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Implications for Prebiotic Chemistry and the Need for Experimental Follow-up (2017, methodology): “We take the surface albedo to be 0.2, a representative value for rocky planets and consistent with past 1D modeling for Earth and Mars (Kasting 1991; Segura et al. 2003; Wordsworth et al. 2015).”