It turns out that there is more water on Jupiter’s moon than we thought. You should look at the surface.
Ridges that run across the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa show that there are small pockets of water beneath, which increases the chances that extraterrestrial life could be found.
Europa has long been thought to be a good place to look for life in our solar system because of its huge ocean, which is thought to be filled with liquid water that is needed for life.
In this case, the ocean is supposed to be 25–30 km under all the ice and snow on the moon, but that’s not good. As a result of new research, water may be closer to the surface than previously thought.
People studying an ice sheet in Greenland watched a presentation about Europa and saw something they recognized.
“We were working on something else that had nothing to do with climate change and Greenland’s surface when we saw these tiny double ridges,” said the study’s senior author, a geophysics professor at Stanford.
Greenland’s M-shaped ice crests looked like small versions of the double ridges on Europa, which are the most common thing on the moon.
When Nasa’s Galileo spacecraft first saw the double ridges on Europa, it didn’t know how they were made at the time, but now we do.
In order to see how Greenland’s ridges formed, the scientists used ice-penetrating radar. Water pockets that were about 30 meters (100 feet) below the ice sheet’s surface froze and split.
“This is very exciting because scientists have been studying double ridges on Europa for more than 20 years and haven’t yet come up with a definitive answer about how double ridges form.” Riley Culberg, an electrical engineering PhD student at Stanford, is the lead author of the new study.
In this case, it was the first time we could watch something like this happen on Earth and see the subsurface processes that caused the ridges to form.
There must have been or still are a lot of shallow water pockets if Europa’s double ridges also form in this way.
Water pockets on Europa could be five kilometres beneath the moon’s ice shell, but that would still be much easier to reach than the moon’s far more deep ocean.
There would also be “interesting chemicals” from space and other moons in the water closer to the surface, which would make it more likely that life could start.
“If there is life on Europa, it almost certainly came from somewhere else, and that means that life must have been easy to start all over the galaxy and beyond.” This is what project scientist Robert Pappalardo said.
