NASA NTRS1993
Large changes in the orbital elements of Mars on timescales of 10(exp 4) to 10(exp 6) years will cause widely varying climate, specifically surface temperatures, as a result of varying insolation. These surface temperature oscillations will produce subsurface thermal gradients which contribute to the total surface heat flux. We investigate the thermal behavior of the Martian regolith on orbital timescales and show that this climatological surface heat flux is spatially variable and contributes significantly to the total surface heat flux at many locations. We model the thermal behavior of the Martian regolith by calculating the mean annual surface temperatures for each epoch (spaced 1000 years apart to resolve orbital variations) for the past 200,000 years at a chosen location on the surface. These temperatures are used as a boundary condition for the deeper regolith and subsurface temperature oscillation are then computed. The surface climatological heat flux due to past climate changes can then be found from the temperature gradient between the surface and about 150 m depth (a fraction of the thermal skin depth on these timescales). This method provides a fairly accurate determination of the climatological heat flow component at a point; however, this method is computationally time consuming and cannot be applied to all points on the globe. To map the spatial variations in the surface heat flow we recognize that the subsurface temperature structure will be largely dominated by the most recent surface temperature oscillations. In fact, the climate component of the surface heat flow will be approximately proportional to the magnitude of the most recent surface temperature change. By calculating surface temperatures at all points globally for the present epoch and an appropriate past epoch, and combining these results with a series of more precise calculations described above, we estimate the global distribution of climatological surface heat flow.