Only now is it becoming apparent that this science-fiction dream of terraforming Mars yesteryears is close at hand. New studies suggest that added to Mars’s atmosphere, just a few specks of particles, would heat it by over 10°C in months, potentially making it hospitable for liquid water.
It relies on resources easily procurable from Mars. The idea is to manufacture small rod-like particles using Martian dust, a material rich in a lot of iron and aluminum. Such artificial particles would trap the escaping heat of the Sun and scatter some of the light back to the surface, therefore boosting the weak greenhouse effect of the planet. This would warm the planet to an extent far greater than previous proposals that would require shipping gases from Earth or mining Mars for its rare materials.
“It’s not that often you get some quite new, innovative idea for terraforming,” said Colin McInnes, a space engineer at the University of Glasgow who was not involved in the study. As he points out, the gap between Mars’s current state and its habitability may be much less of a chasm than we usually envision.
This research group from the University of Chicago and the University of Central Florida created particles approximately the size of commercially available glitter that can trap heat much better than the dust on Mars. These engineered nanoparticles in very small amounts could bring with them optical effects that are outside any conventional expectations.
“you would still need millions of tons to warm the planet, but that’s five thousand times less than you would need with previous proposals to globally warm Mars,” says Kite another co-author. Calculations suggest that pumping these particles continuously at 30 liters per second could warm Mars by as much as more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit with discernible effects within months. The warming would also be reversible, stopping within a few years if the particle release was stopped.
Still, the researchers caution that much work remains. It’s still not clear how quickly the engineered dust would cycle out of Mars’ atmosphere. As the planet heats up, water could begin to condense on the particles, dropping back to the surface as rain, another layer in the already complex climate.
“Climate feedbacks are hard to model,” Kite says. Much more data would be required both from Mars and from Earth if impacts were to work as expected, and any actual implementation would need to proceed slowly and reversibly.
While this method represents a huge step forward in research on turning the desert planet into a potential abode as the Earth’s sister, the study concerns warming Mars to temperatures at which microbial life could survive and maybe even sustain the raising of food crops. “This research opens new avenues for exploration and potentially brings us one step closer to the long-held dream of establishing a sustainable human presence on Mars,” Kite concluded.
The study, “Feasibility of making Mars habitable with artificially created global warming using only current technology,” utilized Northwestern’s high-performance Quest computing facility as well as the University of Chicago Research Computing Center. Other co-authors include Ramses Ramirez of the University of Central Florida and Liam Steele, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at UChicago, now with the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.