Rusty Mars crust proposed as ancient climate heater — SkimNews
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- Cin-Ty Lee proposed that hot water rusting iron in Mars’s crust could release a steady hydrogen supply into the atmosphere for millions of years, supplying a missing ingredient for warming.
- Hydrogen at even a few per cent could lift Mars’s average global temperature above freezing, depending on atmospheric CO2; H2–CO2 collisions let the molecule pairs absorb infrared wavelengths CO2 alone cannot block.
- Mars’s southern highlands are underlain by crust thought to extend as far as 80 kilometres below ground; Lee’s 2024 calculations showed sufficiently thick crust could melt ice in its upper few kilometres and create aquifers.
- Lee’s proposed hydrothermal pump would circulate water through porous basalt to shed heat, while rusting iron and releasing hydrogen; it eventually stopped when water ran out and radioactivity diminished, leaving Mars cold.
- Ramses Ramirez remains skeptical until a full paper appears and says the idea would need “extremely favourable circumstances” to explain Mars’s formerly warm surface; he notes water releasing hydrogen from rocks was proposed more than a decade ago, while Lee argues thick crust makes it nearly inevitable.
- Oxidation several kilometres below Mars’s surface would, in Lee’s view, identify this as the only way to produce the hydrogen; impacts and wind erosion exposing the rust would also explain the red dust coating Mars.
Why it matters: Lee’s mechanism gives Mars researchers a concrete geological test: rusting detected several kilometres below the surface would support the planetary heat engine and explain the red dust. Ramirez remains skeptical until the full paper appears, leaving the warm-climate case dependent on avoiding “extremely favourable circumstances.”
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