A consistent picture of early hydrodynamic escape of Venus atmosphere explaining present Ne and Ar isotopic ratios and low oxygen atmospheric content

A time dependent model of hydrogen hydrodynamic escape powered by solar EUV flux and solar wind, and accounting for oxygen frictional escape, has been implemented in primitive Venus conditions. The model is constrained by the present 20Ne/22Ne and 36Ar/38Ar ratios in Venus atmosphere. It suggests that the net total amount of water delivered to the planet during accretion (≈ 10–100 Myr) is not in excess of the content of ≈ 5 Terrestrial Oceans (5 TO). In our preferred scenario, 60% of the oxygen (3 TO) is left behind the hydrogen during the first 100 Myr. From a comparison with Earth's case, we suggest that hydrodynamic escape has dried up Venus atmosphere early in its history (≈ 70 Myr), triggering the crystallization of the magma ocean, and leaving no available water in the atmosphere to condense out and form an Earth-size water ocean. On the contrary, Earth, possibly endowed with more water, and subject to a weaker hydrodynamic escape, would have remained wet after the crystallization of its magma ocean. We suggest that the oxygen left behind the escaping hydrogen during the main hydrodynamic phase on Venus has been dissolved in the magma ocean, and lost through oxidation. In the proposed scenario, the dense Venus CO2 atmosphere doesn't result from an initial episode of runaway (or moist) greenhouse, but has been formed during the crystallization of the magma ocean, by progressive exsolution of carbon dioxide, at a time when the atmospheric partial pressure of water was of a few hundred bar. In the subsequent period, from ≈ 100 to ≈ 500 Myr, the hydrogen of the water delivered by comets may have been removed by continuing thermal escape, resulting at 500 Myr in a water global equivalent layer (GEL) of a few meters depth (or less), probably under the form of water vapor in the atmosphere, and a molecular oxygen atmosphere of ≈ 10 bar or so. At later times, pick-up ion escape may have removed most of the remaining water, and led to the present D/H atmospheric enhancement factor of 150. The ≈ 10 bar of oxygen may have been absorbed by crustal oxidation.