Impact-driven planetary desiccation: The origin of the dry Venus

- Impact-driven planetary desiccation is proposed to explain the water deficit on the Venusian surface.
- Impact bombardment excavates the planetary crust/mantle down to several tens km.
- Impact-generated ejecta remove EUV-generated oxygen in the hot Venusian atmosphere via high-temperature oxidation.
- The surface water on Venus with a mass of the terrestrial ocean would be removed.
- Impacts cause an efficient mixing between the crust/mantle and the atmosphere.

The fate of surface water on Venus is one of the most important outstanding problems in comparative planetology. Although Venus should have had a large amount of surface water (like the Earth) during its formation, the current water content on the Venusian surface is only 1 part in 100 000 of that of the mass of Earth's oceans. Here a new concept is proposed to explain water removal on a steam-covered proto Venus, referred to as “impact-driven planetary desiccation”. Since a steam atmosphere is photochemically unstable, water vapor dissociates into hydrogen and oxygen. Then, hydrogen escapes easily into space through hydrodynamic escape driven by strong extreme ultraviolet radiation from the young Sun. The focus is on the intense impact bombardment during the terminal stage of planetary accretion as generators of a significant amount of reducing agent. The fine-grained ejecta remove the residual oxygen, the counter part of escaped hydrogen, via the oxidation of iron-bearing rocks in a hot atmosphere. Thus, hypervelocity impacts cause net desiccation of the planetary surface. I constructed a stochastic cratering model using a Monte Carlo approach to investigate the cumulative mass of nonoxidized, ejected rocks due to the intense impact bombardment. The ejecta mass after each impact was calculated using the π-group scaling laws and a modified Maxwell's Z model. The effect of projectile penetration into the ground on the ejecta mass was also included. Next, an upper limit on the total amount of removed water was calculated using the stoichiometric limit of the oxidation of basaltic rocks, taking into account the effect of fast H2 escape. It is shown that a thick steam atmosphere with a mass equivalent to that of the terrestrial oceans would be removed. The cumulative mass of rocky ejecta released into the atmosphere reaches 1 wt% of the host planet, which is 10 000 times of the current mass of the Earth's atmosphere. These results strongly suggest that chemical reactions between such large amounts of ejecta and planetary atmospheres are among the key factors required to understand atmospheric mass and its composition, not only in the Solar System but also in extrasolar systems.