Seen from space, the regions of Mars around the south pole have a strange shape, with a “Swiss cheese” shape. These formations originate from large CO deposits2 ice and ice water, similar to the different layers of the cake.
For many years, planetary scientists wondered how this could be possible, because people believed that this layer would not be stable for long.
But in 2020, Peter Buhler, a Research Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, and a team of researchers discovered how the Swiss cheese-like world is formed: It was due to the change in the axial tilt of Mars that caused changes in the atmosphere. pressure, which produces water and CO2 ice.
But he was able to calculate the CO value2 and the water is stored for millions of years, which is about ten times longer than the orbits of Mars.
Now, in a follow-up study, Buhler was able to model how the frozen atmosphere of carbon dioxide and water waxes and wanes over the 100,000 years of Mars’ polar tilt.
The model allowed researchers to determine how water and carbon dioxide have changed on Mars over the past 510,000 years.
“Mars has a 100,000-year cycle in which its rates vary from being too tilted towards or away from the Sun, Buhler said, in a press release.
“This variation causes the amount of sunlight at each latitude, and therefore the temperature of each group, to also move around. The water ice moves from the hotter areas to the colder areas during this time, driving the water on Mars for a long time.”
Pictures of H2Oh and CO2 ice can explain the climate history of Mars, because the southern ice is the only place on the red planet where carbon dioxide remains at the surface throughout the year.
“This deposition is important because it is a direct record of how water and carbon dioxide have traveled on Mars,” Buhler said.
“Water density tells us how much water vapor has been in the Martian atmosphere and how much of that water vapor has moved around the Earth. Carbon dioxide levels tell us the history of how much of the atmosphere was frozen on the ground, and therefore its thickness. Or how thin Mars’ atmosphere was in the past.” .”
Buhler explained that knowing the history of pressure in the atmosphere of Mars and the availability of water is very important to understand how the climate of Mars works and also about the geologic, chemical, and possibly biologic history.
“Before this research, the amount of water flowing in this way was not very certain,” he said. “This study answers this open question by explaining the ice on the southern surface of Mars.”
Buhler created a numerical model to measure the formation of the layers over time and ran the model about a billion times, “each time using the control function H.2O ice deposition as a function of Mars’ orbital configuration,” he wrote in his paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters.
What they found that reproduces the sequence seen in southern Mars is that the abundance of H.2O ice decreased when the axis tilt of the earth and vice versa.
Buhler said that the results “provide a major step forward in the investigation of water conditions on Mars and, in addition, the long-term availability of water ice or liquid ice. The availability of nearby sources of water is very important to support nearby life as we know it.”
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the first article.
