Citrus College Venus & Mars Atmospheric Changes Questions

1) Concept maps are a way to help you organize your knowledge of a subject. Concept maps begin with a main idea (or concept) and then branch out to show how that main idea can be broken down into specific topics.

You can organize concept maps in many different ways, as a quick Google image search will show you. Here’sLinks to an external site. an example of a concept map about Earth’s geology. Here’s a concept map about concept maps (Links to an external site.).

Look them over and then create your own concept map about the moons of jovian planets, using your assigned reading. You can draw the concept map on paper and convert it to a .pdf using Genius Scan or other software. There are also digital concept map making websites like Lucidchart.

You created a concept map for Homework Assignment 8. A special kind of concept map is called a flowchart, which lists the steps in a process with lines or arrows connecting them. There are two flowcharts to make for this assignment.

Part 1: Venus’s Changing Atmosphere (40) (and yes, Venus’s is not a typo (Links to an external site.))

Put the following events in order. Then create a flowchart that lists how they are connected. Each step of this flowchart should include one of the following items, except for the last step, which includes two. You may need to review your notes from the lectures 4 and 5. The first four steps in the process include one item each. The last step includes two items.

• Water evaporates from the rivers, lakes, and oceans on the surface of Venus.
• Venus gets so hot that both the day and night side are hotter than an oven set to “broil”.
• The presence of more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases Venus’ greenhouse effect.
• Venus is 30% closer to the Sun than Earth. Although this may not seem like much, it is enough to give the planet a higher temperature.
• The loss of water inhibits the CO2 cycle from taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
• The atmosphere thickens until it the atmospheric pressure would crush any human to set foot on the planet.

Part 1: Mars’s Changing Atmosphere (60)

The flowchart for Mars is more complicated. It starts with one fact that immediately contributes to three separate outcomes in the next step and goes on from there.

• Plate tectonics slows down and eventually stops.
• Since Mars has only 1/3 Earth’s mass, Mars radiates away its internal heat to space within about 1-2 billion years and it’s core thickens and or solidifies.
• The solar wind breaks apart water molecules in Mars’s atmosphere. The hydrogen escapes to space and the oxygen reacts with surface rocks, causing Mars to take on a red color.
• The interruption of the CO₂ cycle causes carbon dioxide to build up in Mars’s atmosphere.
• Volcanism slows down and eventually stops.
• Mars’s magnetic field weakens and eventually disappears.
• Lowered atmospheric pressure causes water to evaporate at lower temperatures.
• Mars’s slowly dries out.