A1_11 Mars' Magical Cows

Abstract

The Kármán line defines the edge of the atmosphere and in our last paper we found that this would be 210km above the Martian surface. From this value and modelling a plane parallel atmosphere we deduce that reproducing cows could produce the total mass of methane required for this atmospheric volume within 56.8yr. The total number of cows this would require is significantly larger than the surface area of Mars and so we also determined that for the maximum number of cows able to be on the Martian surface, they could create this methane atmosphere in ∼1200yr.