Underwater Snow On Earth Gives Clues About Europa\'s Icy Shell

Snow that has fallen under water on Earth can provide clues regarding Europa’s icy outer shell

New York, Aug 16 : Examining an underwater snow that is eerie beneath the ice shelves on Earth could help in understanding the ice shell that surrounds Jupiter’s moon Europa according to scientists.
Europa is a rocky planet that is about the size of the moon of the Earth.

 Underwater Snow On Earth Gives Clues About Europa's Icy Shell-TeluguStop.com

It is surrounded by an ocean that is larger than the ocean and a miles-thick , ice shell.

Below Europa’s thick, icy crust lies a huge, global ocean in which the snow floats upwards on submerged ice peaks that are inverted and topped with ravines.

The snow that is underwater is cleaner than other types of frozen ice, meaning Europa’s ice shell may be less salty than was previously believed, according to the study that was published in the journal Astrobiology.

The findings are crucial for mission scientists who are preparing NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft which will make use of radar to look under the ice shell to determine if the ocean of Europa is suitable for life.

Studies have indicated that the salinity, temperature and pressure of Europa’s ocean closest to the ice are similar to the conditions you discover under an Ice shelf in Antarctica.

The new data is crucial since salt that’s trapped in the ice could affect the depth and type of radar can see into the ice shell, and being able to determine the components of ice composed of will assist scientists in making sense of the information.

Knowing the kind of Europa’s ice shell is composed of can help determine the salinity, as well as the habitability of its ocean, according to researchers from the University of Texas at Austin.

“When we’re looking at Europa we’re interested in the salinity and composition of the ocean because it’s one of the elements that will determine its potential habitability, or even the kind of living things that could exist there.” stated principal author Natalie Wolfenbarger, a graduate student researcher at the university’s Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

The study also looked at the two different ways water is frozen under shelves of ice, congelation ice and frazil ice.Congelation ice is formed directly beneath the ice shelf.Frazil ice is formed as ice fragments in supercooled seawater that floating upwards in the sea before settling at the bottom of the shelf of ice.

Both methods create an ice that is less salty than seawater which Wolfenbarger found to be less salty if it was scaled up to match the age and size of Europa’s Ice Shell.

Furthermore, the frazil ice which holds only a tiny portion of the salt in seawater is likely to be quite common on Europa.

Its ice shell could be an order of magnitude more pure than previous estimates.This has implications for everything from strength to how heat is able to move through it and the forces that cause a type of Ice Tectonics, Wolfenbarger said.

According to co-author Donald Blankenship, a senior researcher at UTIG the research is confirmation of the use of the Earth as model to study the habitability of Europa.

“We can make use of Earth to determine the habitability of Europa and analyze the exchange of impurities between ocean and ice and find out the locations of water in the ice” he said.

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