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

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

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.