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GeoGeoGeoGeo OP t1_iu2gzc0 wrote

Reply to comment by FLICK_YOLI in Magma on Mars Likely - Until now, Mars has been generally considered a geologically dead planet. An international team of researchers led by ETH Zurich now reports that seismic signals indicate volcanism still plays an active role in shaping the Martian surface. by GeoGeoGeoGeo

That's not how self sustaining geodynamos work

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Newpocky t1_iu4wjl4 wrote

You telling me the movie The Core lied to me?!

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FLICK_YOLI t1_iu2npkr wrote

Well, I never said that I knew how they did, just saying that heard the talk about nuking Mars to melt the core and create a magnetic field, and if the core is already at least partially heated, the thought occured to me that perhaps that makes such a thing more viable.

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GeoGeoGeoGeo OP t1_iu3cg6y wrote

I'm not sure what you heard exactly but the reality is that unfortunately it's simply not possible.

Setting aside the difficulties of transporting the ludicrous amounts of nuclear warheads required to heat that much rock, how would you deliver the nuclear warheads to the required depth even if you could get them to Mars?

The deepest hole on Earth (Kola Superdeep Borehole) took about 21 years(?) of active drilling to reach a depth of ~12 km. At that point drilling was too difficult to continue as temperatures were hotter than expected and the rock began to behave like a warm plastic so the hole would collapse on itself (on Earth there's a transition zone where rocks go from behaving in a brittle fashion to behaving in a ductile fashion known as the Brittle-Ductile Transition Zone, this transition will exist on every rocky planet at slightly different depths). To reach the core of Mars, you'd need to drill down ~1,560 km. That means that on Earth, the Kola Superdeep Borehole managed to reach an equivalent of 0.7% of the way to the Martian core. Just over half of 1%.

Hopefully that helps paint a partial picture as to why the idea of restarting the magnetosphere on Mars has no basis in reality.

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FLICK_YOLI t1_iu3cpb0 wrote

Oh yeah, I've heard that it wasn't technically feasible for a lot of reasons. Kinda' why I said, hey, maybe if there's heretofore unknown existing magma under the surface, maybe that can change some things. But thanks for the deep dive there, my man!

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