A team from UNIGE, NCCR PlanetS and CNRS has managed to simulate the entire runaway greenhouse effect, which can make a planet completely unhabitable.

The Earth is a wonderful blue and green dot covered with oceans and life, while Venus is a yellowish sterile sphere that is not only inhospitable but also sterile. However, the difference between the two bears to only a few degrees in temperature. A team of astronomers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and members of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS, with the support of the CNRS laboratories of Paris and Bordeaux, has achieved a world’s first by managing to simulate the entirety of the runaway greenhouse process which can transform the climate of a planet from idyllic and perfect for life, to a place more than harsh and hostile. The scientists have also demonstrated that from initial stages of the process, the atmospheric structure and cloud coverage undergo significant changes, leading to an almost-unstoppable and very complicated to reverse runaway greenhouse effect. On Earth, a global average temperature rise of just a few tens of degrees, subsequent to a slight rise of the Sun’s luminosity, would be sufficient to initiate this phenomenon and to make our planet inhabitable. These results are published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The idea of a runaway of the greenhouse effect is not new. In this scenario, a planet can evolve from a temperate state like on Earth to a true hell, with surface temperatures above 1000°C. The cause? Water vapor, a natural greenhouse gas. Water vapor prevents the solar irradiation absorbed by Earth to be reemitted towards the void of space, as thermal radiation. It traps heat a bit like a rescue blanket. A dash of greenhouse effect is useful – without it, Earth would have an average temperature below the freezing point of water, looking like a ball covered with ice and hostile to life.

On the opposite, too much greenhouse effect increases the evaporation of oceans, and thus the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. “There is a critical threshold for this amount of water vapor, beyond which the planet cannot cool down anymore. From there, everything gets carried away until the oceans end up getting fully evaporated and the temperature reaches several hundred degrees,” explains Guillaume Chaverot, former postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Astronomy at the UNIGE Faculty of Science and main author of the study.

World premiere

“Until now, other key studies in climatology have focused solely on either the temperate state before the runaway, or either the inhabitable state post-runaway,” reveals Martin Turbet, researcher at CNRS laboratories of Paris and Bordeaux, and co-author of the study. “It is the first time a team has studied the transition itself with a 3D global climate model, and has checked how the climate and the atmosphere evolve during that process.”

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