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So if we could cause mars to heat up, would oceans form or would it start to evaporate into space?

• kabdib 12y ago
  It's a lot of energy to make those oceans, on the order of decades of the total solar radiation that Mars receives (my SWAG is over 10 years just to get ice past the melting point). Something like 5E16 KJ, plus whatever you need to warm the ice up to 0C. Of course, this isn't practical. Once you do that, then, yeah. Water vapor rises, gets slammed by UV radiation and dissociated, and hydrogen goes thataway (not sure what happens to the oxygen, maybe it gets bound up in the soil?). It's pretty much how Mars lost its atmosphere to begin with. Not having a magnetic field is bad for the environment.
• jxcl 12y ago
  I am not an astrophysicist, but my understanding is that melting the ice would cause it to escape into space for at least two reasons: 1) Mars' core has cooled significantly, and it no longer has a powerful magnetic field to protect it from solar winds. Solar winds have the ability to take a polarized molecule like H2O and strip it from the atmosphere. It's also much easier to strip it from Mars because 2) Mars has a gravity of approximately 1/3rd of what Earth has. Combined, these two factors mean that Mars has an atmosphere that is 0.6% as thick as Earth's.