As the moon Europa’s icy shell is pushed and pulled by Jupiter’s gravity, it heaves up and down. That process creates enough heat, scientists think, to create a global subsurface ocean on Europa. Experiments by Brown University researchers suggests that this heating process, known as tidal dissipation, creates more heat in ice that scientists have generally assumed. The insight could help scientists model the thickness of Europa’s icy shell. Credit: NASA/JPL
Jupiter’s moon Europa is under a constant gravitational assault. As it orbits, Europa’s icy surface heaves and falls with the pull of Jupiter’s gravity, creating enough heat to support a global ocean beneath the moon’s solid shell. Now, experiments by geoscientists from Brown and Columbia universities suggest that this tidal dissipation, could create far more heat in Europa’s ice than scientists had previously assumed. The work could ultimately help researchers to better estimate the thickness of moon’s outer shell.
The largest Jovian moons -Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto -were first discovered by Galileo in the early 1600s. When NASA sent spacecraft to Jupiter in the 1970s and 1990s, those moons proved to be full of surprises. “There was clearly some sort of tectonic activity–things moving around and cracking. There were also places on Europa that look like melt-through or mushy ice.” The only way to create enough heat for these active processes so far from the sun is through tidal dissipation. The effect, McCarthy says, is a bit like what happens when someone repeatedly bends a metal coat hanger. “If you bend it back and forth, you can feel it making heat at the junction,” she said. “The way it does that is that internal defects within that metal are rubbing past each other, and it’s a similar process to how energy would be dissipated in ice.”
Working with Prof. Reid Cooper, McCarthy loaded ice samples into a compression apparatus. She subjected the samples to cyclical loads similar to those acting on Europa’s ice shell. When the loads are applied and released, the ice deforms and then rebounds to a certain extent. By measuring the lag time between the application of stress and the deformation of the ice, McCarthy could infer how much heat is generated.
Modeling approaches had assumed that most of the heat generated by the process comes from friction at the boundaries between the ice grains. That would mean that the size of the grains influences the amount of heat generated. But McCarthy found similar results even when she substantially altered the grain size in her samples, suggesting that grain boundaries are not the primary heat-generators in the process. Most of the heat actually comes from defects that form in the ice’s crystalline lattice as a result of deformation. Those defects, the research showed, create more heat than would be expected from the grain boundaries.
“Christine discovered that, relative to the models the community has been using, ice appears to be an order of magnitude more dissipative than people had thought,” Cooper said. More dissipation equals more heat. “Those physics are first order in understanding the thickness of Europa’s shell. In turn, the thickness of the shell relative to the bulk chemistry of the moon is important in understanding the chemistry of that ocean. And if you’re looking for life, then the chemistry of the ocean is a big deal.” https://news.brown.edu/articles/2016/04/europa
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