of rain every day is needed just to get a mazda kilometer of ocean depth in that time now air is thankfully a lot lighter so you only need around a thousandth as much material for an atmosphere and mars needs nitrogen but it's got plenty of carbon dioxide and water in those ice caps for atmospheric purposes another use of nukes is to bake oxygen right out of the rock itself people tend to think of rocks as being full of metal and oxygen being something in the sky but in truth oxygen is the largest component of most rocks and vaporizing a couple of kilograms of martian regolith is going to get you about a kilogram of breathable oxygen nukes are fantastic at such vaporization and while rock takes more energy to melt than ice it's still in that general zone where you might expect mega tons of nuke to yield you a lot of oxygen and water vapor too there are also a lot of other things you might not want to breathe initially not all bad mind you you could get some good greenhouse gases out that way too though similar to a volcanic eruption you also have the option for cooling a planet again outside of mars we would always want the same approach and we'll discuss using nukes for handling a snowball earth scenario in a moment on some planets you might be able to set off volcanoes too especially with a superior knowledge of tectonics that we might acquire in centuries to come and much like nudging a comet such an application of a nuke might take that already energy dense item and use it to get orders of magnitude more energy by setting off a volcano or sending a commodore asteroid on a collision course but orders of magnitude are important to remember for another case we often hear about which is to give mars a magnetic field by nuki its core now this is an example where nukes really should not be seriously considered where you drill down to the martian core to drop nukes in there and get it molten and spinning to generate a magnetic field the reality is that the mass of planetary core makes its polar ice caps or even its entire first kilometer deep of the surface look minuscule and mass and energy needs and in this case as we've discussed before rather than using enough nuclear blasts to half detonate the planet and utterly wreck the surface you can't just put a fairly modest electromagnet at the plant's lNUMBER_TOKEN point with the sun we are talking on the large side for a modern nuclear reactor or a major hydroelectric dam and obviously in a place where solar power is abundant and reliable orbital magnetic satellites powered by solar also work with this and simply make way more sense than throwing trillions of nukes down a bottomless hole to melt half the planet and try to spin it i think folks often assume that just because this is how earth gets its magnetic field this is how we need to do it but to be honest a big molten ball of metal spinning around is a terribly inefficient and impractical way to generate a magnetic field inferior to methods we've had longer than we've had light bulbs on the whole there's a definite case for using nukes to terraform mars in various capacities but i don't think this is one of them now speaking of half melting a planet to close out for the day while there's probably more cons than pros to a nuclear bombardment of mars specifically to terraform
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