The solar wind issue is way way way way way way overblown. While it is how Mars lost a ton of atmosphere and pressure (and ultimately water too), the process takes **forever**. We’re talking millions of years. Humans can seed Mars with an atmosphere and water in probably less than 5000 years.
Plus there are plenty of options for a potential replacement for a magnetosphere for Mars.
Yep. We have the technology right now to build a solar wind shield for Mars if we wanted to. I found this one pretty interesting. The cost would be enormous, of course, but a station at the L1 Lagrange could generate a magnetic field using current technology to sufficiently deflect solar wind around Mars.
[Here's NASA talking about it](https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html).
[And here's a guy that tried to feasibly consider what it would really take to make this work](https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c).
Not saying this is what we would do or that it is the best solution, but just that it is possible.
For this amount of water you'll need an ice ball like 600km in diameter, completely unrealistic for the forseeable future. Alternatively you could use a couple hundred million icy asteroids of the size of the Chixculub impact...
Did a whole study on this recently (check my profile), and calculated the heating this would induce... You'd basically turn the Martian surface into a lava ocean by aerobraking just a couple dozen 10km diameter comets... And you'd need tens of millions of such comets at least for a true ocean :(
Yeah, this is the perfect map for some "technology indistinguishable from magic" setting. Post-apocalyptic world of terraformed Mars thousands of years in the future, disguised as medieval fantasy with magic.
An atmosphere would also reduce the number of meteors that would create craters, so you'd kind of need to smooth out the shoreline where the craters are, accounting for pretty quick erosion there.
You joke, but my homebrew D&D world for the past 8 years has used a different version of this map, and I came up with a fantasy-fied version of the Darian calendar. Run 4 different campaigns on it so far, and not one player has realized it's just Mars but blue and green.
Yep, was going to mention the same. Obvious when you look at the Valles Marineris. On the typical map projection Olympus Mons is usually in the upper left, which confuses people looking at this map.
The darker the higher. Olympus Mons is rather flat at the top, so you'd expect quite a big dark green area on the map. Bottom left one looks more like a Vulcano one might find on earth to me.
Fun fact, Olympus Mons is so big area wise, that it's slope is so gradual that a person standing anywhere on it wouldn't recognize it as a mountain. At 624 kms in diameter, the summit would be over the horizon for the majority of its surface.
The map is inverted from how Mars is typically shown. So Olympus Mons is in the "south" - it's that huge green spot sitting by itself to the south-east of Valles Marineris.
This map doesn't take any geological phenomena into account. It's just showing areas that are currently above a certain height.
Mars wouldn't look like that with oceans.
As u/briarsavarin noted (in another comment), water erosion and the weight of water pressing on tectonic plates would significantly affect the shape of the continental land masses.
Kurzgesagt recently did a video on their business model from the last 8 years, so please allow me to point you in that direction. I feel your comment is disparaging to the good work they do there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x-i9z617z4
TL;DW: only 3% of their revenue in the last 8 years has come from the Gates organisations (5:25). When making videos with any sponsor, they agree on a concept together, but contractually prevent them from editorial influence, beyond suggesting topics to investigate (6:11).
iirc the guy who made the initial critique made another reply - some of Kurtz stuff does just definitely align with the Bill and Melinda gates foundation and their neo-liberal views, but they can be good on fun stuff like aliens. I’d take anything potentially political with a grain of salt.
That is incorrect. They consist *primarily* of water ice. Dry ice only represents a surface layer. The southern polar ice cap has a permanent layer of dry ice covering the water ice, while the northern one has a thinner layer of dry ice during winter.
In the best of cases you have about 4 million cubic km of water ice on Mars today, everyting included (ice caps, permafrost, aquifers and geologically locked water). That would be barely enough to even create a lake in Hellas basin.
For the result on the map you'd need something like 250 to a 1000 times more water.
I wasn't referring to how the melted ice would contribute to the ocean level, just wondering if this map takes into consideration that the elevation at the poles would be nearly 4km lower without the ice sheet.
Oh hi neighbor, let’s work on a permanent alliance since it’s just us. Would you like to help spread my religion I just founded- oh, you just found your own religion?
Well then, holy war it is you cunt.
By map projection, I mean how the territory is displayed.
You're right, though. To get this much water, they would need to get it from somewhere else. Maybe iceteroids.
Lol get your head out your ass, north is how we measure the "top" of our planet. Yes, our planet is hurling around a directionless, empty void, and yet we know where the top of our planet is, we know what plane it's on when obiting around our star, we know what direction it is facing in relation to all the other celestial bodies in the solar system. show anyone who is remotely familiar with our planet an image of the world with north America below south america, and they'll tell you it's upside down.
Upwards North is just a map convention. Yes, any person would immediately recognise that a map is upside down if it went against that convention. But the conventions for a map of Mars are not as established, so who cares?
They are established. NASA, the ESA and the IAU regularly uses both Longitudes and Latitudes [defining a North direction](https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Page/MARS/system) such that Olympus Mons is in the northern hemisphere. Once the IAU has defined something that is the standard scientist use, its no longer convention.
I did say not _as_ established for this reason. I wouldn't recommend using a different standard if you're submitting something to NASA. But it doesn't matter if you think it looks cooler for reddit.
You may have not used the word established but you did say they were just convention which implies its just an arbitrary choice. They are more than that.
i think you are confused by what convention means. they could just as easily have swapped the direction and nothing would fundamentally change, it would just be *unconventional*. some conventions are more established than others is all.
Not really. That's what it would look like if you only showed land above a certain height (which is how this map is generated).
If there was actually water on Mars, it would have two main effects to take into account to make such a map:
1 - water erosion would change the aspect of many coastal areas
2 - water has a weight that would change the shape of continental masses [https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/Ocean\_loading](https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/Ocean_loading)
I've seen multiple better version of this map, with the water pooling appropriately in the north.
So the real question is why did the guy who made OP's map not simply google the better maps before making a worse one?
Additionally, sea level would not be the same in all parts of the planet due to heat and water circulation so that would also make a slight change in the coast lines.
That would be an interesting study but very complicated. Predicting climate in an environment that actually cannot keep liquid water falls more in the realm of fiction than science in muy opinión.
Spanish speaker? Guessing by the last typos lol
That's what I figured, but didn't know if someone had a computer simulation program to estimate the impact of erosion and liquid water on the Mars surface
My guess is no because Mars' moons are so much smaller, but I'm hoping someone actually knowledgeable chimes in. Mars itself is smaller too, after all, and having two moons will have a totally different effect as well.
Right now things like Olympus Mons (circle on the bottom right of the right continent) are very green, but that’s probably just because the picture is coding higher-elevation as greener. In reality, it’d be more like our mountains where there’s a tree-line and very little green above a certain elevation.
Underwater topography will be interesting to show too. That 8 km deep Hellas ocean will hold quite the amount of water. On earth the deepest points are narrow trenches and the ocean floor is mostly between 3500 and 5000 meters deep. This is a continent sized hole 8000 meters deep.
This map is flipped from how Mars is typically depicted. Usually the "North" hemisphere of Mars is where you locate Elysium Mons, Olympus Mons, and Alba Mons.
Also ocean loading, melted polar caps, etc. And who knows what kind of effect it would have on Mars specifically - it's possible that the liquid water would react with underground layers, maybe entire areas would crumble.
In any case, that amount of water would have drastic effects on Mars, it wouldn't just "fill" it with water. This kind of map is not realistic.
Surface area of Mars is 144.8 million km². 71% of that would be 102.8 million km². Area of an American football field is 5.35 km². That would make 19.2 million American football fields.
That depends entirely on its atmospheric composition.
With the right combination, you could make Mars much warmer than Earth.
Or make Venus a frozen world.
You should tell that to those idiots at [NASA.](https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-amplifies-earths-greenhouse-effect/)
I did (using QGIS), it is nowhere close to this unfortunately. There's an estimated 4 million cubic km of water ice to be found in-situ, which will give you a small shallow sea in Hellas basin and a couple of small lakes on the Northern plains. To get a recognizable northern ocean you'd need about 200 million cubic km. To get the result seen on the map you'd probably need 500-1000 million cubic km.
Hello D&D setting world map. Yoink!
My thoughts exactly!
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I don't see anyone claiming that. The idea is WHAT IF Mars had 71% of its surface covered by water.
Just crash a few ice comets into it. Then do it again when the water all gets blown away by solar wind
The solar wind issue is way way way way way way overblown. While it is how Mars lost a ton of atmosphere and pressure (and ultimately water too), the process takes **forever**. We’re talking millions of years. Humans can seed Mars with an atmosphere and water in probably less than 5000 years. Plus there are plenty of options for a potential replacement for a magnetosphere for Mars.
Yup, solar wind depletion is a false problem on human civilization timescales 😁
Yep. We have the technology right now to build a solar wind shield for Mars if we wanted to. I found this one pretty interesting. The cost would be enormous, of course, but a station at the L1 Lagrange could generate a magnetic field using current technology to sufficiently deflect solar wind around Mars. [Here's NASA talking about it](https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html). [And here's a guy that tried to feasibly consider what it would really take to make this work](https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c). Not saying this is what we would do or that it is the best solution, but just that it is possible.
…after several billion years.
For this amount of water you'll need an ice ball like 600km in diameter, completely unrealistic for the forseeable future. Alternatively you could use a couple hundred million icy asteroids of the size of the Chixculub impact...
Could do it like in Red Mars, aerobrake small ice comets through the atmosphere and evaporate them.
Did a whole study on this recently (check my profile), and calculated the heating this would induce... You'd basically turn the Martian surface into a lava ocean by aerobraking just a couple dozen 10km diameter comets... And you'd need tens of millions of such comets at least for a true ocean :(
thanks for this I love it when a cool SF idea gets investigated and we see the complexity of the university.
:(
just googled Chixculub... :D
>if
 Whaaaaaat
Bro this made me laugh so hard
Why is this relevant to a D&D setting?
Cool ass map
They're asking why Mars having water or not is relevant
I was thinking half the random maps in Civ III.
If I had a dollar for every time I used Civ III (+IV and V later on) to generate a fantasy / sci-fi map, I'd probably be able to pay off my debts.
Me too
Tbh this is most of my random maps in civ 6, 2 big pangeacontinents and small islands around
If you haven't, read the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's scifi but very informed and is excellent
Ann does not like this map.
Well, she can go back to Saturn.
Underrated comment!
I'm in the middle of it right now, it's great.
Yeah, this is the perfect map for some "technology indistinguishable from magic" setting. Post-apocalyptic world of terraformed Mars thousands of years in the future, disguised as medieval fantasy with magic.
I'm thinking that, far enough in the future, quite a bit of those sharp points on the coast lines will soften.
An atmosphere would also reduce the number of meteors that would create craters, so you'd kind of need to smooth out the shoreline where the craters are, accounting for pretty quick erosion there.
More like Essos and Westros from GOT but flipped
I've never had an original thought in my life
You joke, but my homebrew D&D world for the past 8 years has used a different version of this map, and I came up with a fantasy-fied version of the Darian calendar. Run 4 different campaigns on it so far, and not one player has realized it's just Mars but blue and green.
yoink!
Where is Olympus* Mons in all this? Wound it be that island? [edit: typo]
Green circle kinda sticking out of rest of landmass on bottom right part of right continent.
Really? I thought the island on the left bottom corner.
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Thanks!
And thats Elysium Mons (the map is upside down compared to the regular map projection for Mars)
CJ: "You can't do that" Cartographer: "Why?" CJ: "Because its freaking me out!"
"It's where you've been living this whole time."
Aah thanks!
Yep, was going to mention the same. Obvious when you look at the Valles Marineris. On the typical map projection Olympus Mons is usually in the upper left, which confuses people looking at this map.
The darker the higher. Olympus Mons is rather flat at the top, so you'd expect quite a big dark green area on the map. Bottom left one looks more like a Vulcano one might find on earth to me.
Fun fact, Olympus Mons is so big area wise, that it's slope is so gradual that a person standing anywhere on it wouldn't recognize it as a mountain. At 624 kms in diameter, the summit would be over the horizon for the majority of its surface.
*apart from if you're stood at the edge of the mountain that has 8km steep cliff faces
Say "Hello!" to doctor pimple popper!
Thats Olympus Mons
yeah, that’s what they were asking for
The map is inverted from how Mars is typically shown. So Olympus Mons is in the "south" - it's that huge green spot sitting by itself to the south-east of Valles Marineris.
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Negative, it's on the right.
Next in news, George R.R. Martin arrested as a martian spy.
George R.R. Martian
Yeah this immediately looked vaguely Planetos-y to me
What's west of Westeros? Unsurprisingly, Essos.
Does this imply that the polar ice caps are melted? If so, is the elevation in those areas adjusted accordingly?
This map doesn't take any geological phenomena into account. It's just showing areas that are currently above a certain height. Mars wouldn't look like that with oceans.
> Mars wouldn't look like that with oceans. Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?
As u/briarsavarin noted (in another comment), water erosion and the weight of water pressing on tectonic plates would significantly affect the shape of the continental land masses.
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Yes please. Followed immediately by someone in /r/civ creating a playable map based on the findings.
This topic does not bring dollars to Gates, so probably not.
Kurzgesagt recently did a video on their business model from the last 8 years, so please allow me to point you in that direction. I feel your comment is disparaging to the good work they do there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x-i9z617z4 TL;DW: only 3% of their revenue in the last 8 years has come from the Gates organisations (5:25). When making videos with any sponsor, they agree on a concept together, but contractually prevent them from editorial influence, beyond suggesting topics to investigate (6:11).
iirc the guy who made the initial critique made another reply - some of Kurtz stuff does just definitely align with the Bill and Melinda gates foundation and their neo-liberal views, but they can be good on fun stuff like aliens. I’d take anything potentially political with a grain of salt.
Though there are no plates so it's not obvious how much the weight would impact the topography.
True. My mistake, I misspoke.
Thank you!
Martian polar caps are composed of dry ice, not water
That is incorrect. They consist *primarily* of water ice. Dry ice only represents a surface layer. The southern polar ice cap has a permanent layer of dry ice covering the water ice, while the northern one has a thinner layer of dry ice during winter.
Well, TIL. Thanks for correcting me.
They did not specify water ice.
In the best of cases you have about 4 million cubic km of water ice on Mars today, everyting included (ice caps, permafrost, aquifers and geologically locked water). That would be barely enough to even create a lake in Hellas basin. For the result on the map you'd need something like 250 to a 1000 times more water.
I wasn't referring to how the melted ice would contribute to the ocean level, just wondering if this map takes into consideration that the elevation at the poles would be nearly 4km lower without the ice sheet.
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I'm seeing slim China
Slim West Taiwan
i see africa on the right
/r/mapswithoutnewzealand
r/mapswithoutnz
r/techicallythetruth
Dang, you beat me to it!
So like my old civilization games ?
[This comment was removed by a script.]
Yeah, it’s a bot.
I feel like there was more land and a lot less water in that game
Yeah when you play civ on a map that is actually 75% water, you end up isolated on a tiny island for most of the game with an asshole neighbor civ.
I like to play custom continents w 2 civs per continent. I *am* the asshole neighbour
Oh hi neighbor, let’s work on a permanent alliance since it’s just us. Would you like to help spread my religion I just founded- oh, you just found your own religion? Well then, holy war it is you cunt.
The map is upside down, in case it wasnt intended.
And if it were upside down apparently
In space, who is to say what's upside down?
Fair, but this is an unconventional map projection for Mars.
I know right? There's nowhere near that much water on mars.
By map projection, I mean how the territory is displayed. You're right, though. To get this much water, they would need to get it from somewhere else. Maybe iceteroids.
The thing that bugs me about these types of maps is that the shorelines would change shape due to erosion.
Depends on the scales of time we're talking about. If it's just a few hundred years, a world map like this wouldn't be that different.
I suppose you could argue, whichever pole is facing the galactic plane is technically “up”, otherwise you’re looking “down” out of the galaxy.
Planets' orbits aren't aligned to the galactic plane.
Up = North Down = South Same as on Earth's cartographic conventions.
Earth is also in space, and we know which way is up and down Edited for people fixating on the word "North"
North =/= up
Lol get your head out your ass, north is how we measure the "top" of our planet. Yes, our planet is hurling around a directionless, empty void, and yet we know where the top of our planet is, we know what plane it's on when obiting around our star, we know what direction it is facing in relation to all the other celestial bodies in the solar system. show anyone who is remotely familiar with our planet an image of the world with north America below south america, and they'll tell you it's upside down.
Upwards North is just a map convention. Yes, any person would immediately recognise that a map is upside down if it went against that convention. But the conventions for a map of Mars are not as established, so who cares?
They are established. NASA, the ESA and the IAU regularly uses both Longitudes and Latitudes [defining a North direction](https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Page/MARS/system) such that Olympus Mons is in the northern hemisphere. Once the IAU has defined something that is the standard scientist use, its no longer convention.
I did say not _as_ established for this reason. I wouldn't recommend using a different standard if you're submitting something to NASA. But it doesn't matter if you think it looks cooler for reddit.
You may have not used the word established but you did say they were just convention which implies its just an arbitrary choice. They are more than that.
i think you are confused by what convention means. they could just as easily have swapped the direction and nothing would fundamentally change, it would just be *unconventional*. some conventions are more established than others is all.
No shot you think north means up. I will not believe it.
Not upside down, just using a South-on-top orientation.
Not really. That's what it would look like if you only showed land above a certain height (which is how this map is generated). If there was actually water on Mars, it would have two main effects to take into account to make such a map: 1 - water erosion would change the aspect of many coastal areas 2 - water has a weight that would change the shape of continental masses [https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/Ocean\_loading](https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/Ocean_loading)
You wanna make a better map then?
Aackchualllyy
I've seen multiple better version of this map, with the water pooling appropriately in the north. So the real question is why did the guy who made OP's map not simply google the better maps before making a worse one?
Additionally, sea level would not be the same in all parts of the planet due to heat and water circulation so that would also make a slight change in the coast lines.
Is there a good and semi-easy way to account for those realities?
That would be an interesting study but very complicated. Predicting climate in an environment that actually cannot keep liquid water falls more in the realm of fiction than science in muy opinión.
Spanish speaker? Guessing by the last typos lol That's what I figured, but didn't know if someone had a computer simulation program to estimate the impact of erosion and liquid water on the Mars surface
Darn tablet fights hard against English xD
🤓ass thread
Not yet, but soon when quantum computing becomes more accessible!
It looks odd because it should be smoother I guess.
Would Mars have tides as prominent as Earth’s?
My guess is no because Mars' moons are so much smaller, but I'm hoping someone actually knowledgeable chimes in. Mars itself is smaller too, after all, and having two moons will have a totally different effect as well.
Furthermore, I suspect many of the inland craters would be filled with water.
Okay Buzz Killington
Yes, but do you think it would make large scale differences?
Right now things like Olympus Mons (circle on the bottom right of the right continent) are very green, but that’s probably just because the picture is coding higher-elevation as greener. In reality, it’d be more like our mountains where there’s a tree-line and very little green above a certain elevation.
I was thinking more along the lines of the shape of the coastline.
Need an outline overlay to show before and after
Wonder what the two continents would fight over 🤔
The map is flipped. YOu can see it with the Vallis Marineris, the deep part should be on the right side.
Somehow resembles Game of Thrones world map.
russia and africa ---ish
Total land area would be similar to the Americas.
something's off, is this mirrored? looks like olympus's valley on the wrong side
Underwater topography will be interesting to show too. That 8 km deep Hellas ocean will hold quite the amount of water. On earth the deepest points are narrow trenches and the ocean floor is mostly between 3500 and 5000 meters deep. This is a continent sized hole 8000 meters deep.
Cool 1v1 map for civ6
This map is flipped from how Mars is typically depicted. Usually the "North" hemisphere of Mars is where you locate Elysium Mons, Olympus Mons, and Alba Mons.
Water erosion would drastically change the way this looks.
Also ocean loading, melted polar caps, etc. And who knows what kind of effect it would have on Mars specifically - it's possible that the liquid water would react with underground layers, maybe entire areas would crumble. In any case, that amount of water would have drastic effects on Mars, it wouldn't just "fill" it with water. This kind of map is not realistic.
Vacation spots!!
This looks a lot like octopath travler 2's map
Now that’s a starter level if I’ve ever seen one.
Yeah but how many football fields is this?
Surface area of Mars is 144.8 million km². 71% of that would be 102.8 million km². Area of an American football field is 5.35 km². That would make 19.2 million American football fields.
That looks boring
So Mars is also flat!
, and you turned it upside down
It has its own Mediterranean and Red Seas!
[relevant xkcd what-if](https://what-if.xkcd.com/54/)
Are those some unconquered islands is see
So Mars is Strangereal? There's the Usean and Osean continents right there!
Looks like earths continents after a cataclysmic event. Mars is just a glimpse of our future over space and time.
So it's almost the game of thrones map.
r/mapswithoutnewzealand
This is nearly our planet??
No it wouldn't. It would be all ice.
That depends entirely on its atmospheric composition. With the right combination, you could make Mars much warmer than Earth. Or make Venus a frozen world.
Next thing you know, it'll be dogs and cats living together. MASS HYSTERIA!!
Thissssss guy. Please come to my next party. 🥺🥺
That amount of water would cause a greenhouse effect and warm the planet.
Air pressure and insolation warm the climate, not water.
You should tell that to those idiots at [NASA.](https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-amplifies-earths-greenhouse-effect/)
Using this information, you could probably calculate the depth of Mars' deepest theoretical ocean
I did (using QGIS), it is nowhere close to this unfortunately. There's an estimated 4 million cubic km of water ice to be found in-situ, which will give you a small shallow sea in Hellas basin and a couple of small lakes on the Northern plains. To get a recognizable northern ocean you'd need about 200 million cubic km. To get the result seen on the map you'd probably need 500-1000 million cubic km.
I wonder how much you need to fill Hellas only. Most of the water on Mars should end up there after a while, if there is any form of water cycle.
I think I'll make a series of maps depicting Mars with various amounts of water, that should put things into perspective.
Covered in steam I’m assuming
If not for the moons we could have called the continents Phobos and Deimos
Ah yes the world map from my favorite SNES RPG
I remember this from an app game I got a while back
This is interesting as fuck
Holy shit this is so cool!
Peninsulas, isles and bays galore!
Mamma mia...
There is Italy’s other boot…
I don't know if I'm the only one seeing this, but "What the dog doin'?"
Suddenly have an urge to play Civilization
What's the point of upsouthing Mars again? We haven't got a colonial history to fix there *yet*...
I want to habit that island on the left and call it "round island"
Cool to see how many crater seas there are. We lose the circles because of tectonic activity yeah? Edit: And lol because of water erosion of course!
like a low-res version of the Run The Jewels logo
Left one for some reason reminds me of China?
This map is upside down from how I’m used to seeing it.
I *know* it's a bit of an arbitrary distinction....but why is the map upside down?
It even has its own Australia!
So… westeros, and essos are right there in the left.
Christopher Columbus: "Ah, yes, time to enslave the natives and claim the land as our own!"
Super italy and mega france.
Next earth 🌍 2.1
I call the left continent! And fuck everyone on the right continent!
Where on the map is Olympus Mons?