As Pluto moves away from the Sun in its 248 - year elliptical orbit, temperatures plummet and these compounds
freeze out of the atmosphere and fall onto the surface as frost.
A team led by New Horizons team member Jeffrey Moore, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, has determined that formation of the bladed terrain begins with methane
freezing out of the atmosphere at extreme altitudes on Pluto, in the same way frost freezes on the ground on Earth, or even in your freezer.
An examination of these changes gave them new insights into how much of the polar ice cap's carbon dioxide
freezes out of the atmosphere during winter.
In the winter, when water vapor is
frozen out of the atmosphere, ozone accumulates.
You could send the world back to a «dark age» where that pesky carbon dioxide could be simply be
frozen out of the atmosphere if desired.
And on Mars CO2 gas
freezes out of the atmosphere in the polar region at winter.
In the far northern latitudes there's not much surface area so the error probably doesn't mean much but then again when water vapor is
frozen out of the atmosphere the so - called IR window gets a lot bigger and fewer clouds closing it back up means the error might be significant because radiative cooling efficiency is drastically increased in very cold clear sky.
Not exact matches
So, although Pluto's
atmosphere gets thicker and thinner through its orbit
of the sun, it may never completely
freeze out and «collapse.»
Now, if you have all this very cold, nearly
freezing water surrounding these ice caps, sucking up carbon dioxide
out of the polar
atmosphere, at nearly the highest possible rate, 30 times faster than oxygen, and 70 times faster than nitrogen, doesn't it stand to reason that the air that remains might just have a lot less carbon dioxide in it than the
atmosphere across the rest
of the planet?
Continued observations
of stellar occultations
of Pluto will show us whether its
atmosphere freezes out.
If we start
out with a balanced system which contains
frozen water at the poles, the mid to high latitudes begin to thaw, triggering soil greenhouse gas feedbacks (permafrost thaw and following oxic and anoxic sources add to the greenhouse gas budget), a chronic linear process (which helps to accelerate changes
of the equilibrium state, reduces the ability
of the
atmosphere to break down greenhouse gases — less hydroxide radicals).
Then simply force
atmosphere through the interior
of the pile and it will
freeze out more CO2.
Santa's elves got fed up
freezing their asses off in slavish servitude to the jolly elf, and so they all went
out and bought heaters, fired»em up, and started the polar ice melting,... which scared the crap
out of the reindeer — LITERALLY, more crap, which caused more greenhouse gases to enter the
atmosphere, which caused more polar warming, which caused more ice to melt, which caused wind patterns to change, thus, driving the wee cloud - warming fairies
out of their warm clouds, creating colder temperatures, transferred by the changing wind patterns, intercepted by all Northern Hemisphere unicorns that inhaled it and exhaled it about the continent to produce record cold temperatures.
The normal CO2 sinks shut down in
freezing conditions but volcanoes continue belching it
out into the
atmosphere regardless
of amount
of ice cover on land & ocean.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and the ongoing global warming driven by carbon dioxide will inevitably force it
out of its
frozen reservoirs and into the
atmosphere to amplify the warming.
Because the basics
of anthropogenic global warming are fairly straightforward — CO2 is a greenhouse gas, because
of the lapse rate water vapor condenses or
freezes out in the troposphere and acts mainly to amplify the effect
of CO2, humans are burning a lot
of fossil C and increasing the CO2 in the
atmosphere, the surface
of the earth is warming, the cryosphere is retreating, the climate that supports civilization is rapidly changing, and consequently we are facing an uncertain future — but the details are complex, it's easy to «misunderestimate» the way climate works in detail.