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Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa

Jupiter’s moon Europa is a prime candidate for extraterrestrial habitability in our solar system. The surface landforms of its ice shell express the subsurface structure, dynamics, and exchange governing this potential. Double ridges are the most common surface feature on Europa and occur across eve...

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Autores principales: Culberg, Riley, Schroeder, Dustin M., Steinbrügge, Gregor
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9018861/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35440535
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29458-3
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author Culberg, Riley
Schroeder, Dustin M.
Steinbrügge, Gregor
author_facet Culberg, Riley
Schroeder, Dustin M.
Steinbrügge, Gregor
author_sort Culberg, Riley
collection PubMed
description Jupiter’s moon Europa is a prime candidate for extraterrestrial habitability in our solar system. The surface landforms of its ice shell express the subsurface structure, dynamics, and exchange governing this potential. Double ridges are the most common surface feature on Europa and occur across every sector of the moon, but their formation is poorly understood, with current hypotheses providing competing and incomplete mechanisms for the development of their distinct morphology. Here we present the discovery and analysis of a double ridge in Northwest Greenland with the same gravity-scaled geometry as those found on Europa. Using surface elevation and radar sounding data, we show that this double ridge was formed by successive refreezing, pressurization, and fracture of a shallow water sill within the ice sheet. If the same process is responsible for Europa’s double ridges, our results suggest that shallow liquid water is spatially and temporally ubiquitous across Europa’s ice shell.
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spelling pubmed-90188612022-04-28 Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa Culberg, Riley Schroeder, Dustin M. Steinbrügge, Gregor Nat Commun Article Jupiter’s moon Europa is a prime candidate for extraterrestrial habitability in our solar system. The surface landforms of its ice shell express the subsurface structure, dynamics, and exchange governing this potential. Double ridges are the most common surface feature on Europa and occur across every sector of the moon, but their formation is poorly understood, with current hypotheses providing competing and incomplete mechanisms for the development of their distinct morphology. Here we present the discovery and analysis of a double ridge in Northwest Greenland with the same gravity-scaled geometry as those found on Europa. Using surface elevation and radar sounding data, we show that this double ridge was formed by successive refreezing, pressurization, and fracture of a shallow water sill within the ice sheet. If the same process is responsible for Europa’s double ridges, our results suggest that shallow liquid water is spatially and temporally ubiquitous across Europa’s ice shell. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-04-19 /pmc/articles/PMC9018861/ /pubmed/35440535 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29458-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Culberg, Riley
Schroeder, Dustin M.
Steinbrügge, Gregor
Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa
title Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa
title_full Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa
title_fullStr Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa
title_full_unstemmed Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa
title_short Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa
title_sort double ridge formation over shallow water sills on jupiter’s moon europa
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9018861/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35440535
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29458-3
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