Early atmosphere on Mars offers clues suggesting a wet planet capable of supporting life

New research distributed in Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggests that Mars was conceived wet, with a thick atmosphere allowing warm-to-hot oceans for millions of years. To reach this conclusion, researchers fostered the main model of the evolution of the Martian atmosphere that connects the high temperatures associated with Mars' formation in a liquid state through to the formation of the principal oceans and atmosphere.

This model shows that — as on the cutting edge Earth — water vapor in the Martian atmosphere was concentrated in the lower atmosphere and that the upper atmosphere of Mars was "dry" because the water vapor would condense out as mists at lower levels in the atmosphere. Molecular hydrogen (H2), paradoxically, didn't condense and was transported to the upper atmosphere of Mars, where it was lost to space. This conclusion — that water vapor condensed and was retained on early Mars whereas molecular hydrogen didn't condense and escaped — allows the model to be connected straightforwardly to measurements made by spacecraft, specifically, the Mars Science Laboratory meanderer Interest.

"We accept we have demonstrated a neglected chapter in Mars' earliest history in the time immediately after the planet shaped. To explain the data, the primordial Martian atmosphere probably been extremely thick (more than ~1000x as thick as the cutting edge atmosphere) and made primarily out of molecular hydrogen (H2)," said Kaveh Pahlevan, SETI Organization research researcher.

"This finding is significant because H2 is known to be a strong ozone harming substance in thick environments. This thick atmosphere would have delivered a strong nursery outcome, allowing early warm-to-high temp water oceans to be stable on the Martian surface for millions of years until the H2 was gradually lost to space. Thus, we construe that — at a time before the actual Earth had framed — Mars was conceived wet."

The data constraining the model is the deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) ratio (deuterium is the heavy isotope of hydrogen) of various Martian samples, including Martian shooting stars and those analyzed by Interest. Shooting stars from Mars are generally molten rocks — they framed when the inside of Mars softened, and the magma ascended towards the surface. The water broke up in these inside (mantle-determined) volcanic samples has a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio similar to that of the Earth's oceans, indicating that the two planets started with similar D/H ratios and that their water came from the same source in the early solar framework.

Conversely, Interest measured the D/H ratio of an ancient 3-billion-year-old clay on the Martian surface and observed that this value is ~3x that of Earth's oceans. Apparently, when these ancient clays framed, the surface water repository on Mars — the hydrosphere — had substantially concentrated deuterium relative to hydrogen. The only cycle known to create this degree of deuterium concentration (or "improvement") is preferential loss of the lighter H isotope to space.

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The model further shows that assuming that the Martian atmosphere was H2-rich at the hour of its formation (and more than ~1000x as thick as today), then, at that point, the surface waters would naturally be improved in deuterium by a factor of 2-3x relative to the inside, replicating the observations. Deuterium favors partitioning into the water particle relative to molecular hydrogen (H2), which preferentially takes up ordinary hydrogen and escapes from the highest point of the atmosphere.

"This is the principal distributed model that naturally imitates these data, giving us some confidence that the atmospheric evolutionary scenario we have depicted corresponds to early occasions on Mars," said Pahlevan.

Aside from interest in the earliest environments on the planets, H2-rich atmospheres are significant in the SETI Foundation's search for life beyond Earth. Tests returning to the center of the twentieth century show that prebiotic atoms implicated in the beginning of life structure readily in such H2-rich atmospheres however not so readily in H2-poor (or more "oxidizing") atmospheres. The implication is that early Mars was a warm version of present day Titan and at least as promising a site for the beginning of life as early Earth was, while perhaps not really encouraging.