"Geoffrey Landis - Ecopoiesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

water was still there, hidden away. The old scientific expeditions had proven
that--frozen in the polar ice-caps, locked into kilometer-thick hills of
permafrost in the highlands. They convinced themselves that there was, in fact,
far more water on Mars than previously suspected, frozen into enormous buried
glaciers under featureless fields of sand. Enough to form whole oceans-- if it
could be melted. All that was needed was a trigger.
It's not easy to heat up a planet, even temporarily. They did it by setting off
a volcano. There were a number of ancient volcanoes on Mars to choose from;
after many geological soundings to determine magma depth, they picked a small
one. Or rather, a volcano small by Mars standards, still a monster by the
standards of any Earthly mountains. Hecates Tholus; the Witch's Teat. To set it
off, they determined, required that they drill five kilometers deep into the
crust of Mars.
Just because it was clearly impossible was no reason they wouldn't do it. Mars
has no magnetic field, and so the solar wind impacts directly on the planetary
exosphere. A thousand miles above Mars, currents of a billion amperes course
around the planet, driven by the solar wind-derived ionization. Joseph Smith
Kirkpatrick and his team of planetary engineers short-circuited this current
with a laser beam, ionizing a discharge channel through the atmosphere, creating
the solar system's largest lightning bolt. They discharged the ionosphere of
Mars into the side of Hecate, instantly creating a meter-deep pool of molten
rock. And then they did it again. And again, as soon as the ionospheric charge
had a chance to renew. And again, a new lightning bolt every five minutes, day
and night, for ten years.
One million lightning discharges, all on exactly on the same spot. They melted a
channel through to the magma chamber below, and a volcano that had been sleeping
for almost half a billion years awakened in a cataclysmic explosion. The
eruption put carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere; more
importantly, it shot a hundred billion tons of ash directly into the
stratosphere. Over the course of several months, the ash settled down,
blackening the surface.
The new, darker surface absorbed sunlight, warming the planet and releasing
adsorbed carbon dioxide from the soil. The released carbon dioxide thickened the
atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect of the thicker atmosphere warmed the
planet yet more. The resulting heat evaporated water from the polar ice caps
into the atmosphere. Water in the atmosphere is an effective greenhouse gas,
even more effective than carbon dioxide, and so the temperature rose a little
more. Finally ice trapped underground for eons melted. A whole hemisphere of
Mars was flooded, eventually to form the vast Boreal Ocean, as well as
innumerable crater seas and ponds. But that was much later. In the beginning, in
Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick's lifetime, only on a band around the equator was water
actually liquid all year round. But that was enough for what they wanted to do.
Slowly, the eons-frozen permafrost of Mars was melting.
The atmosphere was still thin, and still almost entirely carbon dioxide, But
Mars is a sulfur-rich planet. Sulfur dioxide frozen into the soil was also
released, and rose into the atmosphere. Ultraviolet light from the sun
photolyzed the sulfur dioxide into free radicals, which recombined to form
sulfuric acid, which instantly dissolved into the new equatorial oceans . The
new acid oceans attacked the ancient rocks of Mars, etching away calcium
carbonate and magnesium carbonate, releasing carbon dioxide. In a few years, the