Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Ebenezer and Clovis suggest volcanism

Greenhouses and Volcanism on Earth and Mars

There has been some work done on this over the years, but not, to my mind, with adequate rigour or common sense.

The atmospheres of Earth and Mars work in rather different ways:-

On Earth, there is a baseline 1 bar atmosphere of N and biogenic O. This atmosphere is stable against condensation at all reasonable temperatures and is modulated biologically (see Lovelock's Gaia) to maintain comfortable temperatures over the long term.

The Greenhouse on Earth is worth 25-30 K, and is driven by 1) H2O, 2) CO2, 3) other trace gases.

Short-term, if a single giant volcano or a province of smaller ones erupt, they add a contaminant to the atmosphere, at sub % level. This contaminant can add or detract from the existing greenhouse effect, changing global equilibrium temperatures by an appreciable amount. The feedback between different gas species can lead to significant changes in the greenhouse effect.

Over geologic time, the Earth has ranged from Snowball conditions at times in the neoproterozoic to greenhouse in the Eocene and perhaps also in the Carboniferous. (total range, as much as 40 K)

On Mars, the background atmosphere is thin and condensible. Its pressure is balanced by winter polar condensation - the atmosphere itself freezes out. The greenhouse effect on Mars (~5K) is caused by CO2 with a tiny support from the trace of water vapour in the atmosphere.

From Martian volcanic eruptions, the main greenhouse gasses added would be water vapour and CO2. These are both condensible at Mars conditions and excess gas would simply freeze out either locally as a thin snowcap round the vent, or at the pole. The nett effect on the atmosphere would be trivial.

If the Martian atmosphere works the same way as Earth's then the other gases (SO2 etc) would act to COOL the atmosphere far more effectively than the H2O and CO2 would warm it. Volcanoes on Mars lead to global cooling.

"AHA!", you might say. "What if all the volcanoes on Mars erupted at once in a superplume event?" (and this is what Vic Baker posits in his MEGAOUTFLO hypothesis). Wouldn't the rate of addition of CO2 to the atmosphere be faster than the winter freezeout?

Well, Vic conveniently neglects to include calculations of this, and simply arm waves. I've done the calculations and they go like this:

Every Martian winter, an area at the winter pole some 1500 km across accumulates 0.5m of CO2 frost. In order to beat this freezeout, we need to add CO2 at a faster rate than it freezes out. CO2 comes from magma, where it is dissolved as a trace component at the sub % level. But let's pretend that a very gassy magma with 1% CO2 is erupted. To match that 0.5m of solid CO2 frost, we would need 100 times 0.5 m of magma over an equivalent area. i.e. 50m thickness of magma, over a disk 1500 km in diameter. That's around 90,000 cubic km of magma, that must be delivered over a 1 Earth year period.

This is the amount of volcanism needed to add 6 millibars of CO2 to Mars' atmosphere. (and in ideal circumstances, raise its temperature by 5 K).

Tambora was 50-100 cu km. The whole Columbia River Province is 100,000 cu km. You need to do this EVERY YEAR, for a decade or more to materially change the climate on Mars by volcanism alone.

In short, it's laughably impossible. Anyone who believes that volcanism alone can bring springtime to Mars needs the hole in their head fixed. or at least, should be asked to do the supporting maths to show that it is possible, somehow...

Oh, let's do it with an impactor:-

Suppose the yield of magma from an impact is 10 times the volume of the bolide (rather generous, but there's probably a bunch of outgassing, especially if this is an icy bolide, like a comet).

We need a bolide around 9,000 cu km - a tad over 20 km radius. This would carve an impact basin 400 km in diameter. This is MUCH larger than the Chixculub impactor, and is the sort of thing we haven't seen on Earth or Mars since the end of the Noachian Era, ~3.7 Ga.

So you can alter the atmosphere of Early Mars with single giant impacts, or perhaps a combination of multiple close spaced smaller ones, plus a bit of volcanism and favourable orbital parameters. But you can't do it for modern Mars, without invoking a most improbable event that is not in the geologic record. (i.e. it never happened, but it might just possible in the future, but is highly unlikely).

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