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Ice Dusting

In the early stages of the Mars’ terraforming it was recognized that the small martian poles contained vast amounts of water and volatile gases, and that the early part of terraforming would concentrate on liberating this reserve. The formulated process was extremely simple, and was a lot less energy intensive than some proposed methods, which would require vast amouts of machinery and coordination, all that was required was simply to change the colour of the polar caps.

Most polar caps are bright white from frozen water or carbon dioxide, and so reflect a lot of the light and heat that fall on them, this keeps them cool under direct sunlight, but cover them with a black coating and more incoming energy is transferred into the ice, which leads to greater increase in temperature.

The outcome is that a thin layer of scattered dark material spread on the surface of the poles may be enough to significantly accelerate the liberation of gas vapours from the caps, and this, in the case of mars thickens the atmosphere which increases retained heat and further accelerates volatile liberation from the ice.

This method only requires the thinnest scattering of dark material but in principle an evenly spread dark material soon groups together into darker spots, which eat a hole into the ice until they become shaded which somewhat reduces the efficiency of the process. Another problem is that if the dark particles are light they may be picked by the wind and driven from the ice. The solution is to take the scattering material and find an equilibrium between being too small so it is blown away, or to large and starts to clump, though even at best the coating will only remain highly effective in the short term.

The easiest solution in the case of mars would have been to gather hopperfulls of dust and cart it onto the ice caps and spread it about, and it did not matter greatly if it got spread about as there was no end to the supply of dust. But this method was only partly implemented, the dust was also darkened with carbon ‘soot’ which was made by roving vehicles that converted the carbon dioxide ice into oxygen and the carbon dust, these machines induced direct gas release in the form of oxygen and would also wander about the poles checking the dust layering as they went.

Federation times have seen the development of new delivery techniques, the application of carbon soot from space has proved highly effective, the carbon itself is manufactured from carbonaceous asteroids that are extensively used in terraforming to begin with. Other developments, though these have been hampered by the lack of test worlds, include the release of super-hardy algae which colonize the ice and turn it a darker colour, these were originally used in the later stages of the mars project, but these hardy strains are capable of surviving very harsh conditions. Another idea is to use nanites which convert carbon dioxide ice into the dark carbon as they crawl across the polar surface, though control of nanites on this scale has never been attempted.

 
 

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