China News Service, Beijing, April 20 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's academic journal "Nature-Communications" recently published a planetary science paper pointing out that, based on data from the Greenland ice sheet, researchers believe that Jupiter's satellites "" There may be very shallow liquid water on Europa.
The results of this study may add new knowledge to the geophysical process of Europa's formation.
According to the paper, the "Voyager" and "Galileo" probes have both visited Jupiter's moon "Europa". In addition to the simulation results, the data collected by these missions also showed that in a thickness of 20 kilometers -30 kilometers There may be an ocean of liquid water beneath Mi's icy crust.
Understanding the structure and changing process of this ice shell is very important for understanding the geophysical process of Europa's formation.
Corresponding author of the paper, Riley Culberg (Riley Culberg) of Stanford University in the United States and colleagues studied a surface landform called a double ridge (a pair of nearly symmetrical ridges with shallow valleys on the sides), This landform is distributed in every region of Europa, some hundreds of kilometers long.
They found a similar double ridge in the ice sheet of northwest Greenland with the same geometry as the double ridge on Europa.
In order to understand the formation process of the Greenland Double Ridge, the authors of the paper used surface elevation and radar detection data to find that it formed after a series of processes of refreezing, pressurizing and breaking a very shallow body of water within the ice sheet.
They believe that if this is also the process of forming the double ridge on Europa, then it may symbolize the presence of shallow liquid water in Europa's icy shell.
The authors conclude that their findings suggest that the role of shallow water bodies may have a greater impact on Europa's surface topography than previously thought.
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