Did Mars Possess a Dense Atmosphere During the First ∼ 400 Million Years?

It is not yet entirely clear whether Mars began as a warm and wet planet that evolved towards the present-day cold and dry body or if it always was cold and dry with just some sporadic episodes of liquid water on its surface. An important clue into this question can be gained by studying the earliest evolution of the Martian atmosphere and whether it was dense and stable to maintain a warm and wet climate or tenuous and susceptible to strong atmospheric escape. In this review we therefore discuss relevant aspects for the evolution and stability of a potential early Martian atmosphere. This contains the EUV flux evolution of the young Sun, the formation timescale and volatile inventory of the planet including volcanic degassing, impact delivery and removal, the loss of the catastrophically outgassed steam atmosphere, atmosphere-surface interactions, as well as thermal and non-thermal escape processes affecting a potential secondary atmosphere at early Mars. While early non-thermal atmospheric escape at Mars before 4 billion years ago is poorly understood, in particular in view of its ancient intrinsic magnetic field, research on thermal escape processes and the stability of a CO-dominated atmosphere around Mars against high EUV fluxes indicate that volatile delivery and volcanic degassing cannot counterbalance the strong atmospheric escape. Therefore, a catastrophically outgassed steam atmosphere of several bars of CO and HO, or CO and H for reduced conditions, through solidification of the Martian magma ocean could have been lost within just a few million years. Thereafter, Mars likely could not build up a dense secondary atmosphere during its first ∼ 400 million years but might only have possessed an atmosphere sporadically during events of strong volcanic degassing, potentially also including SO. This indicates that before ∼ 4.1 billion years ago Mars indeed might have been cold and dry with at maximum short and sporadic warmer periods. A denser CO- or CO-dominated atmosphere, however, might have built up afterwards but must have been lost later-on due to non-thermal escape processes and sequestration into the ground.