Europa's similarity to Greenland hints that Jupiter moon could harbor life
20 April 2022, 1:40 pm.
11 minutes
By Will Dunham
- video at link -
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The uncanny resemblance between features on Europa’s frozen surface and a landform in Greenland that sits atop a sizable pocket of water are providing intriguing new indications that this moon of Jupiter may be capable of harboring life.
A study published on Tuesday explored similarities between elongated landforms called double ridges that look like huge gashes across Europa’s surface and a smaller version in Greenland examined using ice-penetrating radar.
Double ridges are linear, with two peaks and a central trough between them.
“If you sliced through one and looked at the cross section, it would look a bit like the capital letter ‘M,'” said Stanford University geophysicist Riley Culberg, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
Radar data showed that refreezing of liquid subsurface water drove the formation of Greenland’s double ridge. If Europa’s features form the same way, this could signal the presence of copious amounts of liquid water – a key ingredient for life – near the surface of this Jovian moon’s thick outer ice shell.
More:
https://www.reutersagency.com/en/coverage/europas-similarity-to-greenland-hints-that-jupiter-moon-could-harbor-life/?rpc=401&
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Icy Europa's mysterious double ridges may hint at hidden pockets of water
By Rahul Rao published 41 minutes ago
Liquid water might abound just below the ice-covered surface of Jupiter's moon.
An artist's depiction of pockets of water forming double ridges on Jupiter's moon Europa. (Image credit: Justice Blaine Wainwright)
A ridge etched into the ice sheet of Greenland provides an unexpected hint that plentiful pockets of water may be trapped just underneath the surface of Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa, one of the solar system's likeliest candidates to host microbial life.
The surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's four main moons, is covered with a 15-mile-thick (20 kilometers) ice crust, underneath which scientists believe an ocean swashes. But there might be scientific promises much closer to the frozen moon's surface, according to a new study that found similarities between processes shaping the surface of the distant moon and Earth's own icy Greenland.
Europa's ice crust is latticed with so-called double ridges, pairs of long parallel raised lines with a vale in between, as much as hundreds of miles or kilometers long. Every sector of the moon's surface is marked with a criss-crossing array of these double ridges, but scientists have never been quite sure how they form.
But a recent analysis of satellite images revealed that a strikingly similar ridge formed in the ice sheet covering Greenland about 10 years ago.
More:
https://www.space.com/europa-moon-double-ridges-subsurface-water
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