porosity wave tagged posts

On Jupiter’s Moon Europa, ‘Chaos Terrains’ could be Shuttling Oxygen to Ocean

An artist’s interpretation of liquid water on the surface of the Europa pooling beneath chaos terrain. Credit: : NASA/JPL-Caltech

Researchers have built the world’s first physics-based computer simulation of oxygen transport on Europa, finding that it’s possible for oxygen to drain through the moon’s icy shell and into its ocean of liquid water — where it could potentially help sustain alien life — by hitching a ride on salt water under the moon’s ‘chaos terrains.’ The results show that not only is the transport possible, but that the amount of oxygen brought into Europa’s ocean could be on a par with the quantity of oxygen in Earth’s oceans today.

This theory has been proposed by others, but the researchers put it to the test by building the world’s first physics-based computer s...

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