CO2

Dry Ice Drives Dramatic Changes on Mars

January 25, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Mars may not be tectonically active but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing happening on the Red Planet’s surface. This video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows the dramatic seasonal changes that take place in Mars’ polar regions when the frozen carbon [...]

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Giant Spiders on Mars!

November 16, 2012

Eek, spiders! All right, so it’s not actually little green arachnids we’re talking about here, but they are definitely spidery features. Called araneiform terrain, these clusters of radially-branching cracks in Mars’ south polar surface are the result of the progressing spring season, when warmer temperatures thaw subsurface CO2 ice. Remove this ad

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1981 Climate Change Predictions Were Eerily Accurate

April 6, 2012

A paper published in the journal Science in August 1981 made several projections regarding future climate change and anthropogenic global warming based on manmade CO2 emissions. As it turns out, the authors’  projections have proven to be rather accurate — and their future is now our present. Remove this ad

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Mars’ Underground Atmosphere

April 26, 2011

Scientists have spotted an underground reservoir near Mars’ south pole the size of Lake Superior… except that this lake is filled with frozen carbon dioxide – a.k.a. “dry ice”! A recent report by scientists at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO reveals variations in Mars’ axial tilt can change how much carbon dioxide gets [...]

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More Atmospheric CO2 Today Than in the Past 2.1 Millions Years

June 18, 2009

Researchers have been able to determine the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past 2.1 million years in the sharpest detail yet by analyzing the shells of single–celled plankton. Their findings shed new light on CO2′s role in the earth’s cycles of cooling and warming, confirming many researchers’ suspicions that higher carbon dioxide levels coincided [...]

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