Skip to main content

Martian Clay Could Be Hiding the Planet's Atmosphere

Ages ago in its youth, Mars appeared much like Earth. It was a warm planet with lakes, rivers, and vast seas. It had a thick atmosphere with clouds and rain. One major difference is that the atmosphere was rich with carbon dioxide instead of oxygen. Then about 3.5 billion years ago much of the atmosphere disappeared, and we haven’t understood how. A new study in Science Advances suggests that the waters of Mars may have been the key, and much of the ancient atmosphere may be locked in the surface of the red planet.

The authors center their paper on a clay mineral known as smectite. On Earth smectite is produced through tectonic activity. As tectonic plates are uplifted they can drag material from the mantle to the surface, some of which is this kind of clay. One characteristic of smectite is that it’s full of little folds. Nooks and crannies if you will, that can trap carbon dioxide for billions of years. In an earlier study the team demonstrated how smectite on Earth helped prevent our world from becoming a greenhouse planet by pulling carbon dioxide out of our early atmosphere. It’s a process still going on today. Mars doesn’t experience tectonic activity, but smectite can be found all over Mars, and the authors wondered if it might solve the mystery of the Martian atmosphere.

The processes that captured the Martian atmosphere. Credit: Murray & Jagoutz

The challenge was to figure out how so much smectite formed on Mars. Rather than uplifting tectonic plates it is a series of chemical reactions. The authors suggest that water on Mars seeped through olivine, a magnesium iron silicate common on Earth, Mars, and even asteroids. The iron in olivine would bind with the water’s oxygen and release hydrogen. This hydrogen would then react with carbon dioxide to form methane. Over time this process would transform the olivine into smectite, which would trap methane and carbon dioxide. Based on their calculations the team argues that 80% of the ancient atmosphere is now trapped in the Martian clay, leaving the thin atmosphere we see today.

If this model is true, it could be a boon for future Martian explorers. Not only will there be plenty of water found beneath the surface, there will also be large quantities of methane. The solution to the problems of water and fuel could be right under the feet of those first explorers, trapped in the nooks and crannies of common clay.

Reference: Murray, Joshua & Jagoutz, Oliver. “Olivine alteration and the loss of Mars’ early atmospheric carbon.” Science Advances 10.39 (2024): eadm8443.

Reference: Murray, Joshua, and Oliver Jagoutz. “Palaeozoic cooling modulated by ophiolite weathering through organic carbon preservation.” Nature Geoscience 17.1 (2024): 88-93.

The post Martian Clay Could Be Hiding the Planet's Atmosphere appeared first on Universe Today.



from Universe Today https://ift.tt/WBToqPm
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Researchers Match Up 12 Meteorites with the Near-Earth Asteroids They Came From

Every day meteoroids blast through our planet’s atmosphere to hit the ground as meteorites. A team of researchers in Italy traced twelve of them to progenitor asteroids that orbit in near-Earth space. Scientists treasure meteorites because they reveal information about their parent bodies. In an arXiv paper, two Italian researchers—Albino Carbognani and Marco Fenucci—analyze the characteristics of the parent bodies of 20 selected meteorites. They were able to track all but eight back to their parent asteroids. Based on their work, the pair says at least a quarter of meteorites come from collisions that happened in near-Earth space and not in the Main Belt. Meteorites from Near-Earth Asteroids: How They Got Here Many meteorites are chondritic, similar to asteroids in the Main Belt (or came from it). In their paper, the authors point out that progenitor meteoroids (including many that fall to Earth and become meteorites) formed millions of years ago following collisions between main-...
Post a Comment
Read more

JWST Takes a Detailed Look at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede

Nature doesn’t conform to our ideas of neatly-contained categories. Many things in nature blur the lines we try to draw around them. That’s true of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System. The JWST took a closer look at Ganymede, the moon that’s kind of like a planet, to understand its surface better. Ganymede is basically a planet, except it doesn’t orbit the Sun. If it did orbit the Sun instead of Jupiter, it would be indistinguishable from a planet. It has a differentiated internal structure with a molten core that produces a magnetic field. It has a silicon mantle much like Earth’s, and has a complex icy crust with a deep ocean submerged beneath it. It has an atmosphere, though it’s thin. It’s also larger than Mercury, and almost as large as Mars. According to the authors of a new study, it’s an archetype of a water world. But even with all this knowledge of the huge moon, there are details yet to be revealed. This is especially true of its complex surface...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Blew Up the Local Bubble?

In our neighborhood of the Milky Way, we see a region surrounding the solar system that is far less dense than average. But that space, that cavity, is a very irregular, elongated shape. What little material is left inside of this cavity is insanely hot, as it has a temperature of around a million Kelvin. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/KvVDeiC via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more