On thankfully very rare conditions (T< -78.5C°at 1atm) carbon dioxide can “snow”
ID: 1511413 • Letter: O
Question
On thankfully very rare conditions (T< -78.5C°at 1atm) carbon dioxide can “snow” out of Earth's atmosphere, going directly from vapor phase to solid phase; this happens seasonally over much of the planetary surface on Mars.
(A) Can carbon dioxide ever “rain” from Earth's atmosphere (that is, go directly from vapor phase to liquid phase)? Explain.
(B) The surface atmospheric pressure on Mars is typically about 600 Pa and temperature about 210 K, can water ever form rain in this environment? Explain.
Explanation / Answer
a)CO2 (a nonpolar gas) is only poorly miscible in water (a highly polar solvent). For sea water the result is ~90 mg/kg, or 90 ppm by weight. So it is likely your guess for the amount of CO2 in rain is too high by more than an order of magnitude. Further, isotopic and mass balance studies suggest about 11 gigatonnes CO2 shifts from the atmosphere to the ocean per year under current conditions,The lifetime in the air of CO2, the most significant man-made greenhouse gas, is probably the most difficult to determine, because there are several processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years. The rest is removed by slower processes that take up to several hundreds of thousands of years, including chemical weathering and rock formation. This means that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can continue to affect climate for thousands of years.
Related Questions
drjack9650@gmail.com
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.