Related papers: The Climate of Early Mars

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…

Reconciling the geology of Mars with models of atmospheric evolution remains a major challenge. Martian geology is characterized by past evidence for episodic surface liquid water, and geochemistry indicating a slow and intermittent…

For decades, scientists have tried to explain the evidence for fluvial activity on early Mars, but a consensus has yet to emerge regarding the mechanism for producing it. One hypothesis suggests early Mars was warmed by a thick greenhouse…

The debate over the early Martian climate is among the most intriguing in planetary science. Although the geologic evidence generally supports a warmer and wetter climate, climate models have had difficulty simulating such a scenario,…

It is not yet entirely clear whether Mars began as a warm and wet planet that evolved towards the present-day cold and dry body or if it always was cold and dry with just some sporadic episodes of liquid water on its surface. An important…

The climate of early Mars has been hotly debated for decades. Although most investigators believe that the geology indicates the presence of surface water, disagreement has persisted regarding how warm and wet the surface must have been and…

We discuss 3D global simulations of the early Martian climate that we have performed assuming a faint young Sun and denser CO2 atmosphere. We include a self-consistent representation of the water cycle, with atmosphere-surface interactions,…

The presence of valleys on ancient terrains of Mars suggest that liquid water flowed on the martian surface 3.8 billion years ago or before. The above-freezing temperatures required to explain valley formation could have been transient, in…

Evidence for fluvial features and standing liquid water indicate that Mars was a warmer and wetter place in its past; however, climate models have historically been unable to produce conditions to yield a warm early Mars under the faint…

What was the nature of the Late Hesperian climate? Warm and wet or cold and dry? Formulated this way the question leads to an apparent paradox since both options seem implausible. A warm and wet climate would have produced extensive fluvial…

During the Noachian, Mars' crust may have provided a favorable environment for microbial life. The porous brine-saturated regolith would have created a physical space sheltered from UV and cosmic radiations and provided a solvent, while the…

On the basis of geological evidence, it is often stated that the early martian climate was warm enough for liquid water to flow on the surface thanks to the greenhouse effect of a thick atmosphere. We present 3D global climate simulations…

The climate of Mars likely evolved from a warmer, wetter early state to the cold, arid current state. However, no solutions for this evolution have previously been found to satisfy the observed geological features and isotopic measurements…

Early Mars had rivers, but the cause of Mars' wet-to-dry transition remains unknown. Past climate on Mars can be probed using the spatial distribution of climate-sensitive landforms. We analyzed global databases of water-worked landforms…

Explaining the evidence for surface liquid water on early Mars has been a challenge for climate modelers, as the sun was ~30% less luminous during the late-Noachian. We propose that the additional greenhouse forcing of CO2-H2…

A recent study by Ramirez et al. (2014) demonstrated that an atmosphere with 1.3-4 bar of CO2 and H2O, in addition to 5-20% H2, could have raised the mean annual and global surface temperature of early Mars above the freezing point of…

Early Mars may have had a warmer and denser atmosphere allowing for the presence of liquid water on the surface. However, climate model studies have not been able to reproduce these conditions even with a CO2 atmosphere of several bars.…

The evidence for abundant liquid water on early Mars despite the faint young Sun is a long-standing problem in planetary research. Here we present new ab initio spectroscopic and line-by-line climate calculations of the warming potential of…

The present Martian climate is characterized by a cold and dry environment with a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxides (CO2). In such conditions, the planetary climate and habitability are determined by the distribution of CO2 between…

We compare estimates of atmospheric precipitation during the Martian Noachian-Hesperian boundary 3.8 Gyr ago as calculated in a radiative-convective column model of the atmosphere with runoff values estimated from a geomorphological…