Mars' Ice Age Ending, Climate Change Offers Lessons

Earth is not alone, when it comes to suffering from climate change that is. According to a new study, Mars is also undergoing climate change as well. 

Because the Red Planet is a much simpler laboratory, scientists are now using it to study about climate change works, the learnings and insights of which will be applied here, as reported by News Max.

Scientists have gathered their data using NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter. According to Isaac Smith, the lead researcher of this new study, 

"Mars, without oceans and without biology, is a more simple laboratory in a sense to understand the physics of climate." 

The study also revealed that Mars is starting to exit its most recent ice age. Ice age in Mars cannot be considered equivalent to Earth. 

Ice age in Earth would mean that ice is gathered at the poles at higher elevations. However, because the Martian axis has a significantly wider wobble compared to that of the Earth's, so the temperature there is warmer at the poles if the tilt is at the extreme. 

The scientists claimed that the climate change will continue in Mars and significant changes can be observed in 500 years from now. "Right now Mars is ... the closest [to Earth] it's been in 13 years, and it's just this bright red jewel in the sky," Smith said. "But if you were to live half a million years ago or half a million years in the future, it would look kind of a pinkish color instead of red."

The discovery can be considered accidental, as reported by LA Times. Smith was observing the great spiraling patterns carved into the ice by the winds around the northern pole when he noticed that in the uneven terrain, there were already layers that have been deposited across the ice cap.

This implies that there was a sudden change that made erosion shift to deposition. This also implies that the polar cap at one point in time, suddenly got hit by a lot of water ice. "It was kind of a lucky find, actually, that we noticed that these layers were changing all at the same time," explained Smith.