Mars Thermal History: Core, Atmosphere, Mantle, Phobos, and Surface
This is a project investigating the thermal evolution of Mars begun at the CIDER 2013 conference at UC Santa Barbara. It aims to explain the early cessation of the Martian dynamo and the continued melt production in the mantle by hypothesizing a dense basal mantle layer. Generation of magnetic field requires moving conductive fluid, generally through thermal convection of a liquid iron core of a planet. Supressing heat flow out of the core shuts down thermal convection and stops the production of a global magnetic field. In addition, this dense mantle layer can maintain a hot core and mantle to the present day, allowing some mantle rocks to melt and erupt as the volcanoes we see on Mars today.
This project has resulted in several conference presentations and is currently being written up for publication.