Mars is missing a lot of this crucial terraforming ingredient. Time for a new plan.

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Mars as seen by the Hubble on July 18, 2018.
NASA, ESA, and STScI

▼ Think of a familiar recipe, one so ingrained in your cooking brain that you can whip it together after a long day at work without much thought. You have your bowls and pans laid out on the counter, the oven is preheated, but...shoot. You are completely out of that one key ingredient, and the closest store is tens of millions of miles away. Time for plan B?
For people who dreamed of terraforming Mars using local greenhouse gases, that might be the situation they find themselves in—in possession of a detailed plan but without enough raw materials to see it through to fruition. A paperpublished today inNature Astronomyfinds that there might not be enough carbon dioxide on Mars to make the Red Planet into a second blue marble.
Terraforming Mars at some point in the future isn’t a given—there are long-standing ethicalconcerns about changing another planet to  suit our species—but given the popularity of terraforming in popular culture, and the current (if glacially slow) push to send humans to Mars, research into the terraforming question has continued.
One popular ideafor terraforming Mars proposed harnessing global warming in order to warm a different globe. The idea is that releasing greenhouse gasses into the Martian atmosphere would trap heat from the sun, melting underground stores of ice and carbon dioxide, and creating an atmosphere that is an approximation of Earth’s.
But that relies on there being enough carbon dioxide trapped in ice reservoirs and rocks to make an appreciable difference when released into the air. And this new paper asserts that there just isn’t enough to change things on the planet dramatically.
Using data collected by current missions to Mars, including MAVEN(the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, launched in 2013), researchers were able to pull together a basic accounting of where Mars’ CO2might be hiding.
“One of the scientific questions for Mars has been where did the carbon dioxide go and where did the water go?” says Bruce Jakosky, a geologist at the University of Colorado, and lead author of the paper. “One of the corollaries of that is the basic question: how much CO2is left on the planet and can you mobilize it into the atmosphere?” (▪ ▪ ▪)

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