High-Pressure and High-Temperature Behavior of Venus’s Atmosphere Near
the Surface: A Thermo-Gravitational Study
Abstract
Though Venus’s atmospheric conditions and composition have been directly
measured, the composition of the Venus lower atmosphere near the surface
is generally still poorly known. It was extrapolated from observational
data at other altitudes by assuming the constancy of elemental
composition without condensation (Krasnopolsky 2007). Both in-situ
measurement and remote-sensing observations reveals the most abundant
components that exceed the mixing ratio of 10-4 to be
CO2, N2, and SO2 (Bezard
& de Bergh 2007, JGR 112, E04S07). Water and formation of photochemical
H2SO4 — and condensation of
cloud-forming H2SO4 — is only
important at higher altitudes (Krasnopolsky 2012, Icarus 191, 25). In
this work, the balancing of chemical-gravitational-thermal diffusive
potentials for the ternary mixture of CO2,
N2, and SO2, which represent the neutral
Venusian lower atmosphere near the surface, is addressed to obtain the
composition grading and to evaluate the tendency toward supercritical
density-driven separation of CO2 and N2
(Lebonnois & Schubert 2017, Nat. Geosci. 10, 473). Even though dynamic
atmospheric systems, including advective mixing, are more realistic, the
static cases evaluated in this work provide stationary states where
every dynamic process would eventually proceed to. Hence, our modeling
is of a limiting case of the systems of interest, which could help
explain some indications of compositional grading. The CRYOCHEM equation
of state, which has been successfully applied in describing phase
equilibria of Titan’s atmosphere and the surface liquid (Tan & Kargel
2018, Fluid Phase Equilib. 458, 153), as well as that involving solid
phases on Pluto’s surface (Tan & Kargel 2018, MNRAS, 474, 4254), is
used in this work on the supercritical Venus’s lower atmosphere. In the
absence of direct measurement of composition of the lower atmosphere, as
well as no lab evidence of CO2 and N2
separation under Venusian surface conditions (Lebonnois et al. 2020,
Icarus 338, 113550), the results from this study may at least introduce
some new concepts that would entail some tendency for molecular
fractionation.