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I am developing a plan to colonize Mars.

Due to Mars' current lack of dense atmosphere and lack of oxygen (its found only as traces), I am setting the following plan:

  1. Bore holes through Mars' surface in order to allow gases and lava to escape from its interior, thus increasing the density of Mars atmosphere.
  2. Transport away from the poles the polar cap water.
  3. After enough gases are released and enough water is accumulated into depressions at the equator, create farms to recover carbon dioxide and convert it to oxygen, decreasing the greenhouse effect of a largely carbon dioxide atmosphere.

Can we get enough water from the polar caps and added vulcanism to create large oceans ?

Would this plan work ?

What would take to terraform Mars into a viable colony ?

--- Edit ---

Before people start talking about Mars' lack of lava:

http://www.space.com/16895-what-is-mars-made-of.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11962-lab-study-indicates-mars-has-a-molten-core.html

HDE 226868
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Jorge Aldo
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  • What do you want to do with lava ? – Vincent Mar 02 '15 at 03:29
  • Well, if you bore a hole thru the crust and reach the lava, i am supposing that this would create an active vulcano, releasing lava around the hole, that gets solidified, and so on, creating the typical vulcano structure. – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 03:31
  • The harder part is to find water, the polar caps arent enough to create large oceans, and we cannot force water containning asteroids to hit Mars on a regular basis. – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 03:34
  • To better answer your question : When you have vulcanism you get lava and a lot of gases being released from that lava. – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 03:36
  • That link states that the core is solid. All it says about the mantle is that it's paste; nothing about liquid magma or recient dynamics of any kind. – JDługosz Mar 02 '15 at 04:06
  • So ? Dont you have vulcanos with paste magma ? You said that Mars mantle is cooled solid, now its paste, looks like its possible to have vulcanism with artificial holes being drilled on Mars surface ? – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 04:09
  • What kind of timeframe are you looking for? – Dan Smolinske Mar 02 '15 at 16:25
  • @user3453518 - The pastes existence is dependent on a massive amount of pressure (article linked suggests 40 giga-pascals) and would readily solidify without the pressure...drilling a hole would simply release the pressure and the molten paste would solidify before bubbling to the surface. Also...what type of gas are you expecting to release here? The article linked suggests the core is upwards of 10.6% molten sulphur...and I really doubt you want to release massive amounts of sulphur into your atmosphere. – Twelfth Mar 02 '15 at 20:22
  • Sulfur is common ocurrence on most earth's vulcanos, at that concentration, finding the lower temperature outside the vulcano it would solidify (not sure about that) but gases are not major components of earths magma either, yet, they release a good ammount of gases when they go active. The hole would cause the paste to go outside and solidify, not much different from how earth vulcanos work. – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 20:58
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    Hydrogen sulfide would remain a gas for the most case, except in polar regions (Hydrogen Dioxide would at minimum liquify). Assuming a hole could be dug to the core, the paste would solidify long before reaching the surface...not because it cools, but because the pressure once on it is gone (this is significantly different than Earths volcanoes...it's molten via actual heat and not molten due to pressure). An alternative? Permafrost on Earth tends to hold in many gasses and the melting of it releases them. Warm the polar regions and releasing existing gas trapped beneath ice? – Twelfth Mar 02 '15 at 22:59
  • @user3453518 re paste: Asphalt, or cold hard yet malliable steel that can flow through dies and be shaped with a hammer, but is not liquid in any sense. The crust material floats on the mantle, so (1) it won't squirt out if you breached it, and (2) releasing the pressure makes it a mundane solid again. – JDługosz Mar 03 '15 at 04:31
  • We can't explain geology in the comment. You have basic concepts to learn, and a different SE might be good for asking about that. – JDługosz Mar 03 '15 at 04:33
  • An analogy: dig a well on earth. Itnis not a guiser simply because you reached the water table. It stays in the hole. But that is liquid. Try glass layered over aluminium: brittle crust over flowing solid. Unless you apply a lot of pressure, the metal is not plastic but is the familiar kind of solid matter. – JDługosz Mar 03 '15 at 04:37
  • If you have something under a lot of pressure and open a hole, i believe something is going to be squished away from it... Its not like digging a well on earth, becouse a well is something some meters deep, where pressure gradient is too small to have significance, but to reach the mantle, you are going to dig quite deep, where the pressure gradient between the underground and the surface is quite large enought to guarantee that something is going to rise up the column... – Jorge Aldo Mar 03 '15 at 04:40

4 Answers4

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I think the biggest problem you will have is keeping your atmosphere. creating it is all fine and good, but there is a reason Mars doesn't currently have one. It has no (or extremely weak) magnetic field to protect an atmosphere. So even if you manage to create one, you would constantly have to keep adding to it as it is lost to space.

bowlturner
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I like your idea here, but I don't think it's possible.

First issue...If Mars does in fact have a molten core, a large part of its molten nature is derived through pressure and not heat. The article you linked produced a molten core at 40 giga-pascals with a minimum sulphur content of 10.6%. Lacking the pressure or the sulphur content, this core is solid. If it was possible to drill to it and have it rise up the hole you drilled, the pressure on it would reduce and the material would be back to a solid before it ever had the chance to flow on the surface (mind you, I'm not too familiar with the physics behind drilling to the core of Mars). Remember the paste is semi-liquid due to pressure more-so that heat.

Second issue is the gasses actually being released by this. Sulphur dioxide (formed in high heat magma) would readily solidify when exposed to Martian temperatures...however Hydrogen Sulfide that's formed in low temperature magma (like this would be) would remain a gas except around the polar regions. Hydrogen Sulfide is exceedingly toxic...most safety detection equipment considers 5-10 ppm of Hydrogen sulfide enough to set off an alarm...50-100 will cause serious eye damage...300-500ppm can disable our nervous system...and 1000 part per million of Hydrogen sulfide is near instant death (collapse of lungs after a single breathe). It's actually been used in war times.

Of the gas you'd see escaping into the atmosphere from an eruption...very little of it is what I'd consider human friendly, with the exception of water...you may have to begin a refining program to remove everything you just finished releasing. That said, a good amount of CO2 would get released from this and you may have the opening for plant life to have an abundance of what it requires.

Honestly, I think you would be better off attempting to thaw the polar regions and look for various gasses hidden away under the frozen ice caps, not unlike what is under Earth's permafrost.

Hard to speculate on if there is enough water to form an ocean...remember that mars is relatively flat (no plate tectonics to produce mountains or hills) and the majority of the land is the same elevation, with the exception of volcanoes. Olympus Mons being the largest there. An ocean on mars covers most surface area leaving just these volcanoes sticking up (admittedly Olympus Mons would make a pretty large landmass). I would think that much of Mars's water has been lost over millions of years, though I can't completely rule out a presence of underground water.

JDługosz
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Twelfth
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  • Current thinking is that there is still a lot of subsurface water. I recall a statement like "it didn't go away, it just went under ground" Mars is under active exploration, so, findings are released frequently. – JDługosz Mar 03 '15 at 04:42
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There is no magma, as Mars's mantle is cooled solid.

So no.

Try downing a comet instead, or contrive details where pockets of heat are found only a few miles down, or rely on an impact event to generate heat (and form a lava lake that lasts for years though crusted over).

JDługosz
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    Sorry but this not true. We are yet to confirm that Mars core is solid. Theres recent studies that show otherwise. – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 03:47
  • Can you share a link? I yry to keep up with that stuff. – JDługosz Mar 02 '15 at 03:49
  • https://www.google.com.br/search?q=mars+core&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=-t3zVNKeNc6eyASQ8YDoDw – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 03:50
  • Very funny. What recient study? IAC I was referring to the mantle specifically; perhaps it is not solid through if the outer core is "gooey". – JDługosz Mar 02 '15 at 03:57
  • Lava is lava... Even if its "gooey"... – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 04:01
  • The phase of the outer nickle iron core described as gooey is not liquid in the conventional sense, and is not magma in any manner. Latent heat is released through the crystalization at the inner core surface, and it might cause plastic convection but doesn't melt the mantle material. What recent studies are you referring to? I'd like to read them. (Lava is specifically discharged to the surface, so lava near the core is a non-starter) – JDługosz Mar 02 '15 at 04:12
  • http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11962-lab-study-indicates-mars-has-a-molten-core.html – Jorge Aldo Mar 02 '15 at 04:17
  • For a planet that's "cooled solid", Mars has some pretty big volcanos. – jamesqf Mar 02 '15 at 05:05
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    @jamesqf the volcanoes were formed billions of years ago, before it cooled. – JDługosz Mar 02 '15 at 11:41
  • @jdlugosz: If so, they would have undergone significant erosion. – jamesqf Mar 02 '15 at 19:04
  • @jamesqf, erosion by what? There's no freeze-thaw cycles (the #1 cause of erosion on Earth) away from the poles, no rain (the #2 cause), and the atmosphere is a near-vacuum (the #3 cause). – Mark Mar 03 '15 at 02:54
  • @jamesqf at the poles the annual ice cycle (Pheonex lander was entombed and smashed up the first winter), and there are global dust storms that sand-blast over geologic time with no renewal of the surface. There is also some hydrodymic action making ruts and sink holes. – JDługosz Mar 03 '15 at 04:17
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One interesting idea to get oxygen would be to have a bacterial or nano agent that would free the oxygen from the iron oxide that gives Mars it's red color...
Bringing water and gasses in from outside might be an interesting option. Drop a couple comets on the surface or even burn them up in the atmosphere would bring you lots of gasses. While boreholes might not give you magma to work with, they would still give you heat, which would be a big deal. Mars is cold, so warming the place up would be almost as important as giving it an atmosphere.

Check out Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy for a few other ideas.

AndyD273
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