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Mars Space

What Mars Would Look Like If Its Surface Was Covered With Water (inverse.com) 91

schwit1 writes: A new map shows what the red planet would look like if 71 percent of its surface area was covered with water -- around the same proportion as Earth. The results are spectacular: it shows two distinct landmasses forming, each of which would seem to form continents. While the left side shows a dramatic, mountainous terrain that includes Olympus Mons, the right side seems to offer more flatlands that include planes like Terra Sabaea.

The map was created by Aaditya Raj Bhattarai, a Nepal-based civil engineering student currently studying for his bachelor's degree at Tribhuwan University. "I am [a] big fan of Elon [Musk] and SpaceX and their plan to put man on Mars, and I hope I could help in his cause," Bhattarai says. "This is a part of my side project where I calculate the volume of water required to make life on Mars sustainable and the sources required for those water volumes from comets that will come nearby Mars in [the] next 100 years." [...] Bhattarai noted that in this map, Mars' sea level lies as low as 1,211 meters (0.75 miles) below the geoid level, a level that averages out the ocean surface by removing factors like tides and currents. The sea level also lies a staggering 20,076 meters (12.5 miles) below Olympus Mons, depicted in the image as the top-left-most black dot. Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system and measures more than double the height of Mount Everest.

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What Mars Would Look Like If Its Surface Was Covered With Water

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  • New Netherlands (Score:4, Informative)

    by ElectraFlarefire ( 698915 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @06:08AM (#60388449) Journal

    Required reference: https://what-if.xkcd.com/54/ [xkcd.com]

    • Has anybody else noticed the uncanny resemblance between that map and the map from Game of Thrones?

  • Human overpopulation is killing earth. It's not about not having children, but having much less in the countries with the highest birthrates. There is no need to increase human population to the point where everyone lives in misery until the resources dry up. Sustainable development is key to survival.
    • We're working on it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by MrKaos ( 858439 )

      Human overpopulation is killing earth.

      The Earth will be fine, human civilization won't, humans that remain will probably gather around the fire and tell stories about how the impossible was an everyday thing.

      Sustainable development is key to survival.

      Humans are the Earth's only real hope of reproduction. If we can grow out of our selfish, insular, arrogant, ignorant and apathetic ways we may have a chance of saving all of the wonderful things that have come out of thousands of years of human suffering.

      • You contradict yourself when you state that humans are earth's only real hope of reproduction and then write that follow-up sentence, because seeing humans as the only real hope is the definition of selfish and human-centric. We must see ourselves as a part of a larger ecosystem. It is not only about us, it is about us in relation to everything else.
        • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

          You contradict yourself when you state that humans are earth's only real hope of reproduction and then write that follow-up sentence, because seeing humans as the only real hope is the definition of selfish and human-centric.

          That's because humans are a contradiction.

          We must see ourselves as a part of a larger ecosystem. It is not only about us, it is about us in relation to everything else.

          I thoroughly agree, that is what evolving is all about. Evolving out of our selfish imperatives and taking full responsibility for this planet and the well being of humans that are not yet born by leaving them a world that is healthy and capable of supporting life.

          • Is evolving 'about' something? very interesting. Who decided that? I would assume the 'creator' of evolution? otherwise it has no more meaning then any other chemical reaction. I simply follows physics.

            • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

              Is evolving 'about' something? very interesting. Who decided that? I would assume the 'creator' of evolution? otherwise it has no more meaning then any other chemical reaction. I simply follows physics.

              The English languages has variable uses of words and I was very clear in my use of the word. Definition of evolve: [merriam-webster.com]

              1 : emit
              2a : derive, educe
              b : to produce by natural evolutionary processes
              c : develop, work out

              2a and c both fit my use of the word.

              • Still confused I was addressing "I thoroughly agree, that is what evolving is all about. Evolving out of our selfish imperatives and taking full responsibility "

                Why would it be 'about' that? Why not about becoming more selfish if that is to the greatest advantage ?In the definition you sited Evolution isn't 'about' anything any more then a slow chemical reaction is 'about' something? being 'about' something implies intent or purpose.

                • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

                  Still confused I was addressing "I thoroughly agree, that is what evolving is all about. Evolving out of our selfish imperatives and taking full responsibility "

                  Why would it be 'about' that? Why not about becoming more selfish if that is to the greatest advantage ?

                  You said: We must see ourselves as a part of a larger ecosystem. It is not only about us, it is about us in relation to everything else.

                  It is not a contradiction because we have a relationship to other human beings as well. Being selfish is the greatest advantage to the self, but not to the collective whole of humanity and the ecosystem that we are uniquely qualified to take stewardship of. That's why it's a human responsibility.

                  In the definition you sited Evolution isn't 'about' anything any more then a slow chemical reaction is 'about' something? being 'about' something implies intent or purpose.

                  Evolving beyond selfish imperatives mean overcoming the genetic programming

        • You contradict yourself when you state that humans are earth's only real hope

          He doesn't. In at most a billion years the Sun will grow enough to extinguish all life on Earth. If any of it has any hope at all of continuing to exist beyond that point, it'll be thanks to a technologically advanced species who put effort into moving them out of risk range and settle them into other bodies, either natural, artificial, or terraformed. Maybe another technological species will evolve here eventually, but right now it's only humans, so for all intents and purposes that task falls to us.

          Beside

          • So you think we can build or own "heaven" on earth
            "And then, optionally but also finally, supposing we get to the point of becoming able to technoform Earth's biosphere, we may end up in a position of ceasing predation, and natural selection with it, altogether, thus making it so no being, human or animal alike, has to ever suffer pain again. This is the third way humans may offer hope, this time not only on the scale of mindless ecosystems and species, but on the scale of trillions of individual non-human

            • So you think we can build or own "heaven" on earth

              Nope. Just a world without pain. Those aren't the same. Beside, a heaven-like world would be pretty boring, and that'd be, more than pain, suffering.

              Pain and more specifically suffering are inescapable parts of life, it often serves a necessary and useful purpose, your assumption that it is the enemy shows you understand very little. (...)

              There is some measure of inconvenience and emotional pain that is teaching, but that's very different from the pain of being eaten alive beginning from the soft parts. Rather than thinking in abstract terms, think of concrete examples, not "pain" in general, but specific kinds of pain. If you do you'll find plenty of types of pain that are useless for any kind

              • No all pain exists for a purpose, often times it exists to prevent an oganisms from being eating, squashed , burned etc. It doesn't always succeeded but it's purpose is very evident on a natural level. The only way to eliminate pain is to eliminate nerves.

                • No all pain exists for a purpose (...) It doesn't always succeeded but it's purpose is very evident on a natural level.

                  In evolutionary terms, no pain exists for any purpose since there's no final causation. Rather, different mechanisms, not directly connected to a specific survival challenge, nonetheless helped survival in that condition and were selected for. This process is economical, in the sense many such features end up serving multiple purposes that, under analysis, would actually be best served by different mechanisms.

                  Therefore, organisms have certain sensory detection needs, such as those you describe, and nervous

    • There are plenty of resources. It's distribution that's the problem.
    • by demon driver ( 1046738 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @07:48AM (#60388581) Journal

      Human overpopulation is killing earth. It's not about not having children, but having much less in the countries with the highest birthrates. There is no need to increase human population to the point where everyone lives in misery until the resources dry up. Sustainable development is key to survival.

      No, there is no overpopulation and it isn't killing earth, either. Estimates of a former UN spokesman for World Hunger state that earth would easily be able to feed more than 10 bln people. The problem is an economic system that allocates resources for profit, not for human needs. Also, world population growth has been slowing down substantially over the last few decades.

      The cause for regional high birthrates, which only happen to occur in the poorest, least developed countries, is the unequal distribution of wealth, too. Birth rate in a region is an inverse function of the regions's achieved civilizational level. Helping those regions raise their civilizational level would automatically reduce birth rates. We'd just need to do it.

      • Their populations increase because they are getting aid. Without aid from the first world they would not see such dramatic increases in population. Also with so many people around (+10 billion???), what do you think is going to happen to natural habitats and wildlife? We must see ourselves as part of a larger system, anything else is wrong.
        • by Calydor ( 739835 )

          It's an unpopular opinion but I really wish I could find some data either proving or disproving it.

          Anecdotally I remember ads on TV every year since at least the 90s for UNICEF and similar organizations, showing impoverished African kids and telling these tragic stories of how their parents died and they're all alone in the world and they need the help of us rich guys in the west.

          And this year as I was listening to the story of a girl whose dad left and mother died in childbirth, I started wondering; was th

        • Their populations increase because they are getting aid. Without aid from the first world they would not see such dramatic increases in population.

          There is no evidence of this, as far as I can find. Observation of demography and history seems to show the opposite, that parents who have little assurance of their offspring surviving to adulthood tend to have many more kids, while parents with safety and wealth tend to have fewer kids and invest more into them.

          If you know of some evidence that aid causes population growth, I'd like to see it. Note that mere correlation between areas receiving aid and areas with high birthrates is not evidence of a cau

          • by Calydor ( 739835 )

            Do you have any data on how many kids they are having in the areas that are receiving aid compared to the ones that are not? That would probably be the easiest calculation to make. IF they are having approximately as many children in the aided areas, but the aid means the kids aren't dying (damn, that's dark), then the aid IS causing a population boom, at least indirectly. There's also the issues with religiously motivated campaigns against contraception and similar.

            • Do you have any data on how many kids they are having in the areas that are receiving aid compared to the ones that are not? That would probably be the easiest calculation to make. IF they are having approximately as many children in the aided areas, but the aid means the kids aren't dying (damn, that's dark), then the aid IS causing a population boom, at least indirectly.

              This paper argues that aid decreases fertility: https://www.tandfonline.com/do... [tandfonline.com]. Unfortunately it's paywalled, so I can't see more than the abstract to see how they come to that conclusion or what explanations (if any) they offer. I've previously read many studies that find that the two strongest causes of decreased birthrates are (a) decreased infant and child mortality rates and (b) increased education of females. It's pretty clear that foreign aid which is deployed effectively (not easy!) can have b

        • We must see ourselves as part of a larger system, anything else is wrong.

          Why? We aren't. Human ecology is entirely divorced from the rest of the world's various ecologies, just as surely as the ecology of the Galapagos Islands is divorced from Greenland. There is essentially no overlap. We keep wild ecologies around because they're pretty to look at, nothing more. That is a good and sufficient reason, but we certainly don't need them, and in some cases they're actively dangerous to us. Ask Africans this year about locusts and how wonderful wild ecologies are.

          • Human ecology is entirely divorced from the rest of the world's various ecologies

            Except those other ecologies are feeding us.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by argStyopa ( 232550 )

        " The problem is an economic system that allocates resources for profit, not for human needs. "
        Really? That's pretty funny, because the societies most invested in capitalism are the best fed, and produce the most food.

        The places with the worst starvation and malnutrition issues map generally to totalitarian and socialist governments (which often are simply totalitarian wrapped in faux-socialist garb).

        Hell, the WORST medical problem for the poor in the US - and in other countries that embrace capitalism - is

      • Estimates of a former UN spokesman for World Hunger state that earth would easily be able to feed more than 10 bln people.

        When I was a kid, the earth's population was about half what it is now.
        If we could get back to that level, we might stand a chance of
        defeating global climate change.
        At the current 7 billion, it would be all but impossible.

        And you think the world can sustain 10 billion? Sure, if you think living that in an oven is OK.

    • This is a 1950s meme.
      Not true anymore since 1980.
      Wake up ...

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That is no longer true. The world population, now at 7.7 billion, is expected to peak at 11 billion. [un.org]

      I checked recently and in Nigeria (one of the countries with highest birthrates), fertility rate is currently ~3.5 in cities and ~7.5 in rural areas. Right now Nigeria is urbanizing very quickly, which will automatically bring down birthrates significantly. And with the people in cities becoming wealthier and more educated over the coming decades, we can expect that 3.5 to fall even further. So even the count

      • So even the countries with the highest birthrates right now will be much lower in not too long.

        Too bad that this change is coming 50 years too late.

    • We may wipe out a large portion of the population maybe even our own species, but there is no reason to think the biosphere will not go on and life continue on earth for much longer then we were here or have been here. Why do you put so much importance on your own species?
      It is a really interesting philosophical question. Why selfishly favor the 'human animal' as opposed to all other creatures? For that matter why do you care what happens after you are dead? I think until we can come to agreement on thos

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )

      I think we should do a proper accounting of all Greenhouse gases emitted by everyone alive today as well as 3 generations back. Then set a limit and whoever has exceeded the limit off to the CO2 gas chambers with them. North Am should be left with most of its Asian population while Europe can be virgin territory to resettle folks from Asia.

      Outraged? Yet you had no problem saying other countries should stop having kids.

      • Outraged?

        No, sounds about right.
        It's morons like you that equate having fewer kids with
        mass murder that are the cause of the world's problems.

  • I don't understand why TFA (and hence TFE: it's an excerpt, not a summary) talks about two landmasses when the image [bustle.com] appears to show a single large landmass with island chains scattered around its edge.

    • We've had that on Earth, too. Multiple times, actually. Supercontinents [wikipedia.org] form and break apart as the continents move.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mrbester ( 200927 )

      Because whoever wrote TFA doesn't understand a Mercator projection. This clearly shows that all the high ground is concentrated towards the southern pole from the last time there was any tectonic shift. Which was a very long time ago.

      • I'm not sure that's fair. Whoever wrote the article used a 3rd party website to map it to a globe [maptoglobe.com], and then included screenshots of that. They might well have done that because they weren't happy with the Mercator projection.

        However, it still looks like one landmass to me, although I can see how people with argue differently.

  • Surprising (Score:4, Informative)

    by azcoyote ( 1101073 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @06:33AM (#60388475)
    Mars with water is a lot less earth-like than I expected. First, the land mass is so concentrated near one pole that it makes me wonder how much would be like Antarctica. Secondly, the craters make for so many broken areas and small lakes that it looks like someone used a purely random generator on Civilization. Lastly, the highest terrain is so concentrated in the Tharsis region of the western continent, with Olympus Mons--why isn't it more spread out? I guess that's why it has been argued that Mars completely lacks plate tectonics, even though it's also been argued more recently that it has some.
    • Interesting observations. One could guess the lack of a large flowing object to help form the landmass eventually resulted in this due to the other forces who previously would have competed with water are now having direct impact?
    • Re:Surprising (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @09:05AM (#60388719) Homepage

      Mars is very lopsided (current theory is an ancient cataclysmic impact), so that is to be expected. I'm not sure if the huge number of islands is real or just noise though.

      IMHO, the claims of active global plate tectonics on Mars aren't very compelling. There are some researchers who believe it, but it's not a mainstream belief. Pointing to things like thrust faults and wrinkle edges... well, volcanism creates those just fine on its own. Even the moon has them. Volcanoes create them here on Earth. On Mars, with its supermassive volcanoes, low gravity, and low erosion rates, obviously you expect them on a much grander scale. Valles Marineris itself is believed to have been ripped by the stresses from the formation of Tharsis, for example. You also have a lot more potential for compressional and tensile forces associated with cooling contraction of the crust, in regional segments or as a whole.

      That said, I wouldn't be shocked if it were determined that there was a more low-key, much slower version of what's going on on Venus. On Venus, while it doesn't have proper "plates" that are created, move, and subduct, it appears to have a lot of microplates that sort of wobble around into each other and build up structures at the faults around their edges.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • All the more reason to smash Ceres into it!! :)
        Itâ(TM)s about time that planetoid started earning its keep!

        • Nope. Ceres is NOT an ice ball, like first thought. It is a rock, with water in the middle. It is unknown as to how much water.

          Far better would be to go past Jupiter and push several of the ammonia ice balls into Mars. This would turn from Ammonia (which would heat mars) into N2 and O2.
          • oops.
            N2 and H2O, Not O2.
          • Mars needs mass too, and a bigger moon to kneed the crust a bit! We donâ(TM)t know for sure the core is dead, I would like it bombarded by hundreds of asteroids of different composition to soften it up, then a few big ones to snug up to Deimos , Phobos is a lost cause and will impact on its own in a few hundred thousand years adding its mass to the planet

    • by tragedy ( 27079 )

      Don't forget that this map is generated based on current terrain. If you add oceans of water, there will be plenty of erosion, from the ocean itself and from the water cycle. A lot of features will be eroded away, but new features, like river deltas and other coastal deposits of sediment, will build up. Just the weight of all that water would push down some areas of crust down, which might actually push up other areas, forming new landmasses. Introduce life into all that and you get the formation of all kin

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Earth has had bunched-up continents in the past.

  • I thought the reason the atmosphere was ripped away on Mars was the relative lack of geomagnetic field ? I know there are a lot of people who know all about this, so I'm curious what I'm missing.
    • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @09:22AM (#60388793) Homepage

      This is correct; it's pretty clear from Mars' isotopic ratios that this happened.

      The link talks about terraforming Mars with water from asteroids and comets, but this has always been a highly dubious concept. There's a massive change in potential energy, and that has to go somewhere. If your answer is just "let them drop", not only are you transferring that energy as heat (guaranteed no matter what approach you use), but you're kicking up immense amounts of dust, and if the impactors are large also blowing off a chunk of atmosphere at the same time. And what's the plan... people colonize Mars, and then just abandon it during the apocalyptic impactor bombardment?

      Also, Mars doesn't really need water; there's plenty in the crust to create a habitable environment. It's mainly short on nitrogen. Well, that, and gravity itself. You can create a predominantly O2 atmosphere, with a partial pressure near that of Earth's (1/5th Earth's air pressure), and that'd be breathable and survivable (plants actually love it, although they can sometimes incorrectly interpret it as water stress). But a shortage of nitrogen will make nitrogen fixation for plant life greatly challenging. Temperature regulation and increased sunlight could be accomplished by a soletta - although this sort of megaengineering is beyond us at present. Loss of atmosphere to the solar wind occurs over geologic timescales and is not a short-term concern.

      I'm not a terraforming optimist - certainly not short-term terraforming. Longer term feels more realistic, at least. For example, Sagan once proposed - but then abandoned - terraforming Venus with engineered airborne microbes, to sequester the CO2 as non-volatile carbon deposits. His later objection to his own idea was that a planet with a deep carbon surface, high temperatures, and an O2 atmosphere would be a bomb. Additionally, other authors had shown that his microbes would take between tens of thousands to millions of years to eat through the atmosphere. But in practice, these two problems cancel out. There never is some huge carbon deposit in some thick oxygen atmosphere - just a light carbon snow, and tiny amounts of O2 in the atmosphere - which will much more preferentially rust the FeO and other poorly oxidized compounds in the crust, and sequester the carbon in banded iron formations. Indeed, this very thing happened on Earth when earth life discovered how to photosynthesize and release O2 as a waste product - the Oxidation Catastrophe, ~2,4 billion years ago. It's just not a very fast process.

      • Actually, 2 of the better ideas were:
        1) use the ICE ball Ceres. Now, that we know it is NOT an ice ball, but a fluid filled rock, likely not going to happen.
        2) send a couple of the Ammonia ice balls from past Jupiter. Cover them, and then push it to Mars, and let it crash into mars. Once there, it will slowly convert to N2 and O2.
    • Sure, but that's a slow process. At the point at which you can reasonably redirect stuff to hit mars, you can "just" redirect more stuff to replace the losses. And once it has an atmosphere worth mentioning you can run the comets or asteroids or whatever through the atmosphere instead of actually colliding with the planet.

    • the atmosphere was ripped away on Mars was the relative lack of geomagnetic field

      Ripped away? No.
      Slowly drained off? Yes.

      If we melt the CO2, it would take multiple 1000s of years before it was back to the current condition.

  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @07:54AM (#60388591) Homepage

    You need to take the planets spin into account. If the earth didn't spin a huge volume of water would settle at the poles and the world would look very different. Ditto Mars which no only spins at elmost the same speed as earth but only has 0.38 of the gravity so the affects of the spin would be even more pronounced.

    • That's a really interesting point! Taking it a bit further, I think they'd have to add the water in, then recalculate the new mass and rotational rate. That's assuming that the added water is extraterrestrial (if that's the right word), and not from melted icecaps or other existing sources. I'm too lazy to look up if the ice caps contain enough water to fill the simulated ocean.

    • by bgarcia ( 33222 )
      Also, don't forget that Mars already has an equitorial bulge [wikipedia.org] due to its spin. It would be interesting to take that into account as well.
    • by neoRUR ( 674398 )

      So how would the moons affect the water and tides, might be kinds weird with multiple high and low tides.

      • So how would the moons affect the water and tides, might be kinds weird with multiple high and low tides.

        Undetectable. The moons of Mars are tiny. They're so tiny they don't have enough mass of their own to be spherical, let alone generate tides visibly on their neighbor. If you could figure out how to get enough traction, you could build a small ramp on Deimos and run and jump your way into orbit around it. The escape velocity of Deimos is 5.5 m/s. Usain Bolt can hit 12.2 m/s (in Earth gravity). You'd have to circularize your orbit to avoid hitting it on the way back, but you could do it with little mor

  • Looking at the flyby animations in the article, I'm wondering if the vertical scale has been enhanced. My impression of Olympus Mons is that, while tall, it's also very wide. It's 624 km diameter, 25 km tall. The animation shows a peak that looks like its slope has a rise/run > 1.

    • Yes, it was and to a ludicrous degree. Plus there was no curvature of the planet at all.

    • by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      Many flyby animations of the Earth also exaggerate the vertical scale. Many years ago I worked on a game which used terrestrial topographic data and IIRC we had to increase the vertical scale by a factor of somewhere between 3 and 10 to look "realistic" (i.e. how we expected it to look).

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @09:03AM (#60388715)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ... that would probably cease to exist once erosion gets a chance to work on them. Lower mountains as well.

  • At first I thought it was the world. Everything is about water then ... Kadir https://whenwill.net/ [whenwill.net]
  • Of all of these commenters, Iâ(TM)d like to know how many are trained planetary exogeologists... or trained geologists or biologists. Spouting off stuff like we will make the Earth look like Mars is just pure comedy that proves ignorance on the posters behalf. This green and blue ball was here long before we showed up and it will still be around long after we go extinct or at best... leave.
  • Mars is much smaller than Earth. Smaller ball (assuming essentially same materials) = less mass and indeed Mars has less mass (about 1/10th Earth).

    Less mass = lower gravity, and indeed Mars has lower gravity (surface gravity less than 0.4G).

    Atmospheric pressure at surface is weight of column of air which can be held to planet by its gravity = 14.7PSI on Earth at sea level, but on Mars is a teensy fraction of that since it has less gravity to hold the atmosphere down. (only about .6kPa)

    Very low atmospheric p

    • "Therefore: Mars never had much water for any long period of time"

      Agreed. But evaporation/sublimation takes awhile, and if your goal was a few centuries rather than geological periods of time, it could still be doable.

      As to where the water comes from? I'm thinking, changing the orbit of comets. Lots of comets. Watching them hit could be rather cool.

  • Just a guess.

  • What? Huh?

    Is this putting water on Mars or something?

    If there were more or less landmasses forming, would it matter?
  • Recent studies show that Mars was probably mostly covered by ice. It probably still has a lot of permafrost and it still has ice caps. I think that it will take us 50 more years to fully understand the geological history of Mars.

"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll

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