🔭 Did giant asteroid impacts warm up Mars's climate billions of years ago? A recent study suggests so. By triggering chemical reactions, these impacts could have released enough hydrogen gas to heat the planet's atmosphere. 🚀
. The impacts that formed those basins would have released copious amounts of hydrogen gas, Pan and her colleagues concluded, because both the asteroid itself and portions of Mars’s crust and mantle would have been oxidized.
The researchers calculated that impacts that produced basins larger than about 1,200 kilometers in diameter would have created enough hydrogen to heat Mars’s atmosphere to above freezing. But those relatively balmy conditions wouldn’t have persisted indefinitely. That’s because hydrogen, being so light, tends not to stick around. “Even if you put a lot of hydrogen into the atmosphere instantaneously, it will escape very fast,” Pan said.
The Hellas impact basin—the dark blue circular region in this false-color image from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter —is one of the largest known impact craters in the solar system, with a diameter of roughly 2,300 kilometers . Credit:On the basis of assumptions about the physical structure of Mars’s atmosphere, the researchers determined that on the order of a trillion molecules of hydrogen per second would have streamed out of every square centimeter of Mars’s atmosphere.
Pan and her colleagues acknowledged that discrepancy and suggested that Mars’s fluvial features, in some cases, might be older than they appear. It’s possible that erosion or other geological activity could have removed earlier signatures of water-carved features, Pan said. “We just don’t have an exact timing of those early processes.”
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