Mars Recent Climate Change Workshop

The geological evidence for recent climate change on Mars continues to accumulate. Polar layered terrains, midlatitude glacial features, remnant tropical mountain glaciers, youthful ground ice, buried CO₂ ice, and the changing morphology of the south polar residual cap, all point to an oscillating climate system that varies on time scales ranging from hundreds to thousands to millions of years. But the nature, sequence, and driving forces of these changes are uncertain.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the geological and climate communities to assess the evidence for, and mechanisms behind, climate change on Mars during the past 20 My or so. The goal is to constrain the magnitude, timing, and duration of these changes and relate those findings to possible forcing mechanisms.