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Thermo-Chemical Convection in Europa's Icy Shell with Salinity
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Showman, A. P. |
| Copyright Year | 2005 |
| Abstract | Europa’s icy surface displays numerous pits, uplifts, and chaos terrains that have been suggested to result from solid-state thermal convection in the ice shell, perhaps aided by partial melting [1-4]. However, numerical simulations of thermal convection show that plumes have insufficient buoyancy to produce surface deformation [5-6]. Here we present numerical simulations of thermo-chemical convection to test the hypothesis that convection with salinity can produce Europa’s pits and domes. Our simulations show that domes (200-300 m) and pits (300-400 m) comparable to the observations can be produced in an ice shell of 15 km thick with 5-10% compositional density variation if the maximum viscosity is less than Pa sec. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050169984.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
