Liquid Ocean on Europa?

Ryan Finnin Day writes "A team from University of Arizona proposes an explanation for the arcs visible on the surface of Europa: a liquid sea with 98 foot tidal swells cracking the frozen surface. Also in the story, plans for a NASA probe in 2008 to use a laser altimeter to detect tidal swells. Read all about it."

Comments

Woohoo!

[rde]

This is good, good, good news.
The discovery of life on mars would be great, but it's possible (nay, probable) that this life would have the same origin as life on Earth.
Europa, however, is way to far away for this to be probable. It's still finitely possible, but that's all.
And, as we all know, life probably needs water. Life as we know it certainly does.
If there is water on Europa, there may be life. If there's life on Europa, as far as I'm concerned it's ubiquitous.

Ahem (Clarke)

[HP LoveJet]

'"It sure would be exciting if we could go into that ocean if the ocean exists," says Dr. Kargel. "Who knows what we would find there? Maybe an organism."'

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS. EXCEPT EUROPA.

ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

Hmmm...

[Rabbins]

In the article, it states that the first life requires photosynthesis... which would not be able to penetrate more than 15 meters of the frozen crust.

On Earth, isn't it now believed that the first life was formed from "hot beds" on the ocean floors. Where magma broker through the Earth's crust and warmed the water. Obviously, absolutely no rays from the sun are able to penetrate miles down to the bottom of the ocean either.

How are they implying that this could not happen on Europa?

Wow.

[grappler]

Sounds like something right out or Arthur C Clarke's 2010 and 2061. Basically he wrote about Europa having all the ingredients for life (specifically plenty of water) except for a nearby heat source (which is why the monolith turned Jupiter into a star). He wrote about some life forming at the bottom of this ocean next to sources of geothermal heat.

Cool.

This is far from new

[konstant]

Liquid deposits beneath the surface of Europa have been posited for a considerable number of years. Easily since I was in middle school. The Christian Science Monitor is not exactly breaking scientific ground here.

Here is a link to a 1996 conference on this subject.

A similar story is running in Scientific American. You can see the table of contents for this month's issue here.

Points to Remember:
*it may not be water. Long-chain hydrocarbons have also been proposed. It could be from mineral oils to salt water, really.
*the only "new news" here is the theory proposed by these guys from the U. of Arizona that the cracks are consistent with tidal patterns. This is cool, but it is only confirming evidence for what people believed in the first place.
*Europa has strong volcanic activity, similar to its lava-covered sibling Io. This is due to Jupiter's insane gravitational pull. But Europa is colder than Io, because it's further out and has no atmosphere, so it has an icy crust. The idea is that (if it really is H20 ice) the volcanic activity has melted some of the ice. But, again, lots of stuff besides water freezes. All we know is that spectrogr aphically there is some kind of salt there.

I hope it does prove to be water, but let's not get carried away just yet.


-konstant

Re:Well... Circling Jupiter WOULD make large tides

[apocalypse_now]

Well, the ice shell would not always have a source of light, or more importantly, a source of heat energy... While it is facing Jupiter, there is be some elecrtomagnetic intereference with the huge planet that will cause some heat to be released on Europa's surface... And we all know that it is warmer during the day than at night. So, it may be possible that when Europa is facing the sun and is close enough to Jupiter, parts of its surface may heat up enough so that a liquid sea underneath the crust could break through, if even just a little bit. And on a very large moon covered completely with water, 98 feet is just a little bit :)
--
Matt Singerman

Well sure

[cpt kangarooski]

Everyone knows there's life on Europa. Those lines on the surface are from ice skating. I haven't seen a picture of it yet that didn't have a Figure-Zorb in it somewhere. I just hope that when they do send a probe they don't accidently have it arrive during the off-season, when everyone's over at South Molten Lead Beach on Venus.