Climate Change…on Mars
…from NASA…
“One way or another, scientists believe, Mars must have lost its most precious asset: its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide. CO2 in Mars’s atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, just as it is in our own atmosphere. A thick blanket of CO2 and other greenhouse gases would have provided the warmer temperatures and greater atmospheric pressure required to keep liquid water from freezing solid or boiling away.
“Over the last four billion years, Mars somehow lost most of that blanket. Scientists have proposed various theories for how that loss happened. Perhaps an asteroid impact blew most of the atmosphere into space in one catastrophic event. Or maybe erosion by the solar wind — a stream of charged particles emanating from the sun — could have slowly stripped the atmosphere away over eons. The planet’s surface might also have absorbed the CO2 and locked it up in minerals such as carbonate.”
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