Related papers: Geologic Constraints on Early Mars Climate

Chloride-bearing deposits on Mars record high-elevation lakes during the waning stages of Mars' wet era (mid-Noachian to late Hesperian). The water source pathways, seasonality, salinity, depth, lifetime, and paleoclimatic drivers of these…

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,…

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…

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…

River deposits are one of the main lines of evidence that tell us that Mars once had a climate different from today, and so changes in river deposits with time tell us something about how Mars climate changed with time. In this study, we…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Mars' wet-to-dry transition is a major environmental catastrophe, yet the spatial pattern, tempo, and cause of drying are poorly constrained. We built a globally-distributed database of constraints on Mars late-stage paleolake size relative…

The history of rivers on Mars is an important constraint on Martian climate evolution. The timing of relatively young, alluvial fan-forming rivers is especially important, as Mars' Amazonian atmosphere is thought to have been too thin to…

Unraveling the stratigraphic record is the key to understanding ancient climate and past climate changes on Mars. River deposits when placed in stratigraphic order could constrain the number, magnitudes, and durations of the wettest…

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…

The decay of the martian atmosphere - which is dominated by carbon dioxide - is a component of the long-term environmental change on Mars from a climate that once allowed rivers to flow to the cold and dry conditions of today. The minimum…

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…

Terraforming Mars can be evaluated with a set of system-level constraints linking (i) target pressures & compositions to required atmospheric inventories, (ii) target surface temperatures to the required radiative control, (iii) inventories…

Mars was characterized by cataclysmic groundwater-sourced surface flooding that formed large outflow channels and that may have altered the climate for extensive periods during the Hesperian era. In particular, it has been speculated that…

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…

Present-day Mars is cold and dry, but mineralogical and morphological evidence shows that liquid-water existed on the surface of ancient Mars. In order to explain this evidence and assess ancient Mars's habitability, one must understand the…

Martian surface morphology implies that Mars was once warm enough to maintain persistent liquid water on its surface. While the high D/H ratios (~6 times the Earth's ocean water) of the current martian atmosphere suggest that significant…