Considering that there are plans to colonize Mars in the near future, it is surprising that we still do not know much information about what it would really be like to live on the red planet. We already know that there are incredible fluctuations in the weather on Mars and that it is very windy and sometimes cloudy (although too cold and dry for rain). But what about the snow? The truth is that Mars is cold enough to have snow, and now an international team of scientists has discovered that Mars is hit by turbulent snow storms that occur only at night. The study has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Until now, snow falling from low-lying Martian clouds was believed to settle slowly and sparsely on the ground in an environment devoid of violent winds. However, the new findings suggest that the icy water particles that swirl in a storm hit the ground in a matter of minutes, rather than gently descending for hours.
Snowball fight?
Let’s not get our hopes up. Skiing or making snowmen is out of the question. Snow on the surface of Mars does not form a thick layer of snow, but is more like a generous layer of frost.
Mars’ atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s , although it is still thick enough to withstand the weather, including clouds and wind. But there is very little humidity because we are facing a cold desert.
In the Martian Arctic, however, water ice lurks under a blanket of dust , NASA’s Phoenix Lander discovered, scraping below the planet’s surface with a shovel in 2008.
The rover’s lab also analyzed the local climate, detecting signs of precipitation beneath the water ice clouds. This, together with observations from Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, served to devise a new atmospheric model to simulate the weather on Mars, discovering that the cooling of water ice cloud particles during the cold Martian night could create unstable conditions in the clouds.
“We have shown that the snowfall under the clouds is carried by very violent and downward winds,” says Aymeric Spiga, leader of the work.
Simulations have made it possible to calculate that snowfalls on Mars not only occur slowly and gradually, but also that the planet experiences frenzied snow storms that hurl small chunks of ice onto the Martian surface.
To arrive at these data, large-scale climate data, air turbulence models and localized weather predictions were combined.
The Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide (also present as frozen dry ice), along with 2% percent argon and nitrogen, with traces of oxygen, nitrogen oxide, neon, and krypton.
With this atmosphere and its distance from the sun, Mars is a very cold world with an average temperature of -63 ° C and scientists calculate that temperatures in icy clouds plummet rapidly – up to 4 ° C per hour -, making our next trip an icy destination.
Referencia: Snow precipitation on Mars driven by cloud-induced night-time convection. Aymeric Spiga, David P. Hinson, Jean-Baptiste Madeleine, Thomas Navarro, Ehouarn Millour, François Forget & Franck Montmessin. Nature Geoscience (2017) doi:10.1038/ngeo3008
