Elon Musk wants to nuke the Martian ice caps, in order to release CO2 and warm the place up.
Making Mars habitable is a goal of some very smart people, mostly because one day — either due to environmental disaster, an expanding sun, or any other number of disaster scenarios — the Earth will become uninhabitable.
But is nuking Mars really the best way to create a new Earth?
Why it might work
Right now, Mars seems like a dry, dead planet. But its polar ice caps contain about equal parts water and carbon dioxide.
Nuclear weapons could be used to vaporize them, releasing those materials into the atmosphere. Once the atmosphere got thick enough, the greenhouse effect would kick in: energy from the sun, absorbed by the planet and released as infrared radiation, would be trapped.
That would continue heating up the planet, releasing more carbon dioxide, setting off a chain reaction until, ideally, the surface pressure of Mars would increase enough for liquid water to exist — making it much more habitable for oxygen-producing plants.
“You could start turning Mars from a red planet into a green planet,” Michael Shara, curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s astrophysics department, told NBC News.
You just can’t make up stupid like this.
- The nukes would only melt a small amount of ice, an hour later the temperature would be the same as it was before, and the ice would refreeze. Alarmists are always bragging about global warming accumulating billions of nukes every year.
- The Martian atmosphere is already 95% CO2. Adding more will have essentially zero effect on the radiative balance. The Martian atmosphere contains about ten times as many CO2 molecules as Earth’s atmosphere, but the temperature there is -60C.
- The total mass of the Martian ice caps (1.6E18 kg) if entirely evaporated, would only bring the atmospheric pressure on Mars up to about one third of Earth. This couldn’t happen, because half of the ice caps are water, and would remain frozen. The highest atmospheric pressure you could realistically hope for would be about 150 mb. At that pressure, the temperature on Mars would remain well below freezing.
Seventy years ago, scientists wanted to nuke Antarctica to melt the ice cap. They never get any smarter.
Musk isn’t stupid though. It is just one more of his schemes to extract billions of dollars from the US government.