#terraforming

Earth isn’t the only human populated planet in Lupus Automata’s future!

Here’s some ideas I’ve had about Terraformed Mars and how humanity and alien technology has gone about influencing the planet :]

At first I wanted to do Toxicity but it felt like starting from the end. So here are sketches of starting location

Yes I know Mars has no electromagnetic field to protect us from Solar radiation, yes I know we could just live in floating cities on Venus instead, but I want us to do these things because they're difficult and hard and an amazing opportunity to learn about how ecosystems work.

This is obviously not a replacement for Earth of course. Nothing can replace Earth.

But the process of Terraforming would free up some of the population pressures and unlock necessary resources such as fuel and rare earth minerals.

It would still be colder than Earth. Partly because of its greater distance from the Sun but also partly because it would have to have lower temperatures to retain oxygen in its atmosphere at its lower gravity - it's that or raise the atmospheric pressure by pumping it full of heavy gases like CO2 to an extent that would be Not Great for us

It would also be much wetter, because since the whole planet is smaller, a greater percentage of the land area would receive precipitation

The atmosphere might be thicker but I think it would still feel thinner between the lower gravity and the lower oxygen concentration

Overall I would not be surprised if conditions at Mars's sea level felt like conditions in a moderately high mountain range on Earth

I would also not be surprised if clouds formed faster and at lower altitudes as well, which would also help with the "being wetter" thing. Also, fog would be very common, especially near the coasts and the edges of the Tharsis Plateau

Speaking of Tharsis, it as well as Planum Boreum Insula Borea and Planum Australe would have fairly significant ice caps - more like Earth's ice caps than Mars's current polar caps. And these, especially in the case of the Planum Australe glacier, would probably be sources of both wind and snow

Most depictions of a terraformed Mars assume that the coast would more-or-less follow the Martian Dichotomy, which would mean a massive ocean covering most of the northern hemisphere and a more massive continent over most of the southern one. I am not entirely sure how this affects the climate but my best guess is that every landmass in the northern hemisphere would be drenched while in the south, every summer massive rains (and snows, thank you Tharsis) would come in from the north and drench everything as far as 25 degrees south. Then there'd be a smooth transition to a dryer subtropical zone, followed by another transition to a very wet tundra thanks to all the snows and meltwater from the southern glaciers

So basically, as you go from the Martian equator to the south Pole, it would be like going from the wettest part of the Scottish Highlands, to Ukraine's Pontic Steppe, to the wettest part of Siberia, and finally to Antarctica