ZME SCIENCE - Mars is about half Earth’s size and roughly a tenth its mass — not really the sort of planet you’d expect to leave fingerprints on Earth’s climate history. Yet a new set of simulations by an international group of researchers suggests the Red Planet helps shape some of the slow, repeating orbital patterns like Earth’s ice ages and other long-term climate swings.
The work, published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific explores simple “what ifs?”: What happens to Earth’s Milankovitch cycles if you dial Mars’ mass down to nearly nothing? Likewise, how about if you crank it up far beyond its current weight?
Turning the Mars “knob”
Stephen Kane, a professor of planetary astrophysics at the University of California, Riverside and study author, said he had his doubts to begin with. Recent studies have tied deep-ocean sediment layers to Mars-linked cycles, implying that the planet’s gravitational nudges show up in Earth’s geologic record.
He just didn’t expect the weight of the impact.