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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday September 05 2015, @04:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the mega-maid-took-it dept.

A new analysis of the largest known deposit of carbonate minerals on Mars suggests that the original Martian atmosphere may have already lost most of its carbon dioxide by the era of valley network formation.

"The biggest carbonate deposit on Mars has, at most, twice as much carbon in it as the current Mars atmosphere," said Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena. "Even if you combined all known carbon reservoirs together, it is still nowhere near enough to sequester the thick atmosphere that has been proposed for the time when there were rivers flowing on the Martian surface."

Carbon dioxide makes up most of the Martian atmosphere. That gas can be pulled out of the air and sequestered or pulled into the ground by chemical reactions with rocks to form carbonate minerals. Years before the series of successful Mars missions, many scientists expected to find large Martian deposits of carbonates holding much of the carbon from the planet's original atmosphere. Instead, these missions have found low concentrations of carbonate distributed widely, and only a few concentrated deposits. By far the largest known carbonate-rich deposit on Mars covers an area at least the size of Delaware, and maybe as large as Arizona, in a region called Nili Fossae.
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But if the atmosphere was once thicker, what happened to it? One possible explanation is that Mars did have a much denser atmosphere during its flowing-rivers period, and then lost most of it to outer space from the top of the atmosphere, rather than by sequestration in minerals.

If Mars were losing its atmosphere to outer space, wouldn't we able to detect a trail of gas from the planet?


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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday September 06 2015, @03:39AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Sunday September 06 2015, @03:39AM (#232874) Journal

    2. The carbon dioxide leaked into space - more plausible, particularly without a magnetic field (see above)

    If the carbon dioxide leaks into space, where does it go from there? Does it cease to exist, or does it get swept up by the planets farther out in the solar system? Is it that it's still there, presumably, but dispersed below the sensitivity of our instruments to detect it?

    When they talk about atmosphere "leaking into space" it sounds like they're talking about the atmosphere is being destroyed rather than being re-distributed in the ecliptic, as it must if Conservation of Matter is true. And if the atmosphere is being lost to the ecliptic, then wouldn't that same planetary body start sweeping some of that same atmosphere up again as it comes around for another pass?

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