Metaplanets Atlas · Special
Terraforming Mars
One real planet, six futures. We took NASA’s elevation map of Mars, loaded it into Metaplanets Creator, and flooded, greened and re-skied it, stage by stage. Then we stopped obeying physics.
This is a thought experiment, not a forecast. The topography is real: every crater, canyon and volcano below comes from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter. What changes from stage to stage is what we pour on top of it: the height of the sea, the size of the ice caps, how far life has spread, and how thick the sky is. The numbers in each stage (ocean cover, water needed) are measured on the real elevation map.
Stage 0 · Today
Mars as it is
Cold, dry, and almost airless. The starting line is real data, not an artist’s guess.
Every image on this page starts from the same planet: Mars as measured by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor. Its laser altimeter (MOLA) mapped the height of the whole surface, and its thermal spectrometer (TES) mapped how bright the ground is. We loaded both straight into Metaplanets Creator as global datasets, so Olympus Mons, Valles Marineris and the Hellas basin sit exactly where they are on the real planet.
Today the air is about 0.6% as thick as Earth’s, the water is locked in two small polar caps and the ground, and the only weather that reaches orbit is dust. That is our baseline.
- Air pressure
- 0.006 bar
- Ocean cover
- 0%
- Highest point
- ≈ 21 km (Olympus Mons)
- Lowest point
- ≈ −8.2 km (Hellas)
This one is just Mars.
Stage 1 · Year 50
The Thaw
Darken the poles, warm the planet, and the first water pools in the deepest hole on Mars.
Orbital mirrors and a dusting of dark material on the ice caps tip the polar heat balance. The caps shrink, the frozen CO₂ goes back into the air, and the sky thickens into a dusty butterscotch haze.
Meltwater runs downhill. In our model the sea level sits 5 km below the Martian datum: that floods the floor of Hellas and a few pockets of the northern plains, about 2% of the planet. The volume works out to a global layer roughly 20 m deep, which is about what the polar ice is thought to hold.
- Sea level
- −5,000 m
- Ocean cover
- 2.3%
- Water needed
- ≈ 20 m global layer
- Air pressure
- ≈ 0.05 bar
Studies of Mars’ accessible CO₂ (Jakosky & Edwards, 2018) suggest melting everything would only bring the air to a few percent of Earth’s. Fifty years is very generous.
Stage 2 · Year 150
First Rain
The polar ice is not enough. So we bring water from somewhere else.
To go further you need far more water than Mars can supply, so the story turns to comets steered into the planet from the outer Solar System. Each impact adds water, heat and gas.
With the sea at −4,000 m, a shallow sea spreads across the northern lowlands and Hellas becomes an inland sea. The first rain falls, the sky starts to turn blue, and dark lichen-like growth appears along the coasts.
- Sea level
- −4,000 m
- Ocean cover
- 14%
- Water needed
- ≈ 95 m global layer
- Air pressure
- ≈ 0.3 bar
A thick enough atmosphere would also need a magnetic shield: Mars lost most of its air to the solar wind. A shield at the Mars–Sun L1 point has been proposed (Green et al., NASA, 2017); we simply assume it works.
Stage 3 · Year 400
Blue Mars
A northern ocean, white clouds, and snow on the Tharsis volcanoes.
Raise the sea to −3,000 m and the northern hemisphere becomes an ocean. This is close to the shorelines some scientists have traced around the northern plains, where Mars may once have had a sea of its own.
The deepest reaches of Valles Marineris flood into a long, narrow sea. Clouds form, the giant volcanoes catch snow, and green spreads up from the coasts across the southern highlands.
- Sea level
- −3,000 m
- Ocean cover
- 27%
- Water needed
- ≈ 310 m global layer
- Air pressure
- ≈ 0.6 bar
Four centuries for an ocean and a living biosphere is wildly optimistic. Most serious estimates run to tens of thousands of years.
Stage 4 · Year 1,000
Garden Mars
Forests, seas, and a sky you could almost breathe.
At −2,000 m the ocean covers more than a third of the planet. Hellas and Argyre are seas, the Tharsis bulge is a continent, and forests climb from the coasts into the old cratered uplands.
Only the high volcanoes and the dustiest plateaus stay red. From orbit, Mars finally reads as a living world.
- Sea level
- −2,000 m
- Ocean cover
- 36%
- Water needed
- ≈ 630 m global layer
- Air pressure
- ≈ 1 bar
The water alone is about 90 million km³: thousands of large comets, delivered without boiling the planet or wrecking the climate.
Stage 5 · Year ∞
Impossible Mars
Forget the rules. Fill it to the datum, give it more air than Earth, and break Phobos into a ring.
Here we stop pretending. The sea rises to the Martian datum and drowns half the planet. Tharsis becomes a chain of island continents with Olympus Mons as a snow-capped island 21 km high.
The air is 1.6 bar. On a planet with 38% of Earth’s gravity, that takes more air than Earth has in total. And Phobos, which really is spiralling inward and is expected to break into a ring in some tens of millions of years, has been broken up early, so Mars wears a ring.
- Sea level
- 0 m (the datum)
- Ocean cover
- 51%
- Water needed
- ≈ 1.5 km global layer
- Air pressure
- 1.6 bar
Everything. The ocean (≈ 216 million km³, about 16% of Earth’s oceans, or roughly four thousand Hale-Bopp-sized comets), the air, and the ring are all beyond any known engineering.
How we made it
Real Mars in, procedural detail on top
Metaplanets Creator builds planets from a node graph. For this scenario we added a global elevation input: the 32 pixels-per-degree MOLA map (about 1.8 km per pixel) drives the height of the whole planet, and the TES albedo map decides where the dark basalt and bright dust lie. Procedural noise adds detail below the data’s resolution.
One planet, six skies
Each stage is the same planet with a different sea level, ice line, life mask and atmosphere graph: thin CO₂ and dust at the start, Earth-like air and clouds at the end. Every image is a real-time capture from Unreal Engine, not a painting.
Sources
- MGS MOLA Mission Experiment Gridded Data Records, NASA PDS Geosciences Node
- MGS TES albedo global mosaic, USGS Astrogeology
- Jakosky & Edwards (2018), Nature Astronomy: inventory of CO₂ on Mars
- Green et al. (2017), NASA Planetary Science Vision 2050: a Mars magnetic shield
- Black & Mittal (2015), Nature Geoscience: the future ring of Phobos
Build your own worlds, real or impossible, in Unreal Engine 5.
Metaplanets Creator