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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday May 19 2019, @02:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the water-cycle dept.

https://www.livescience.com/65470-strange-martian-water-cycle.html

There's a hole in the Martian atmosphere that opens once every two years, venting the planet's limited water supply into space — and dumping the rest of the water at the planet's poles.

[...]On Earth, summer in the Northern Hemisphere and summer in the Southern Hemispheres are pretty similar. But that's not the case on Mars: Because the planet's orbit is much more eccentric than Earth's, it's significantly closer to the sun during its southern hemisphere summer (which happens once every two Earth years). So summers on that part of the planet are much warmer than summers in the Northern Hemisphere.

When that happens, according to the researchers' simulations, a window opens in Mars' middle atmosphere between 37 and 56 miles (60 and 90 kilometers) in altitude, allowing water vapor to pass through and escape into the upper atmosphere. At other times, the lack of sunlight shuts down Martian water cycles almost entirely.

https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL082839 Dmitry S. Shaposhnikov, Alexander S. Medvedev, Alexander V. Rodin, Paul Hartogh. Seasonal Water “Pump” in the Atmosphere of Mars: Vertical Transport to the Thermosphere (pdf; paywalled)


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 20 2019, @12:03PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday May 20 2019, @12:03PM (#845483)

    Seems unlikely that a single comet strike would raise global Mars temperatures enough to be "too hot" to retain the water. Sure, dump them all in within a 28 hour period, that's too hot. One a month for 100 years?

    This has me thinking, also: where does this escaped water go, and does Earth's moon act to shepherd escaped water back to the planet?

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 20 2019, @04:12PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 20 2019, @04:12PM (#845548) Journal

    It doesn't need to be globally too hot. Locally too hot would do. All it needs to do is cause more loss than you gain, and that doesn't take much with Mars gravity. The speed of the molecules in the air is already enough to cause slow loss, and if recent reports are correct, not so slow loss whenever it warms up a bit in midsummer.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 20 2019, @07:29PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday May 20 2019, @07:29PM (#845606)

      cause more loss than you gain

      Hard to see how an influx of mostly water, even if hot from re-entry (and, how hot can the thin Martian atmosphere really heat a massive solid comet if it is deftly dropped by calculated orbit for a minimum heat before impact re-entry?) could net strip water from an atmosphere and surface so bereft of water in the first place. Is the implication that every meteor impact is stripping volatiles from the atmosphere, even if the meteor itself is comprised of mostly volatiles?

      The ground impact will be hot, stuff will boil away, sure, but, again - shouldn't amount to a net loss, and the ambient global temperature means that the cloud that expands away from the impact crater will cool as it interacts with the thin, but present, atmosphere.

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