Water Loss on Venus

Overview

Water loss on Venus from thermal escape processes.

Date

07/25/18

Author

Rodrigo Luger, Rudy Garcia

Modules

AtmEsc STELLAR

Approx. runtime

49 seconds

The Sun’s XUV radiation likely removed water from Venus early in the history of the Solar System. If Venus was in a runaway greenhouse, then water would be in the stratosphere where it can be photolyzed and the hydrogen can escape. Watson et al. (1981) estimated 280 Myr, but did not account for early activity. Including that effect, VPLanet predicts a desiccation timescale of about 100 Myr.

To run this example

python makeplot.py <pdf | png>

Expected output

examples/VenusWaterLoss.png

Evolution of the surface water content (left) and amount of oxygen absorbed by the surface (right) as a function of time for three different initial surface water inventories. The vertical dashed line is the Watson et al. (1981) timescale for the desiccation of Venus.

examples/BolmontScaling.png

The scaling of the atmospheric escape efficiency for H2O as a function of the XUV flux received by the planet as reported by Bolmont et al. (2017).