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Europa volcanism & interior heating modeled in detail, offers research targets for upcoming missions - NASASpaceFlight.com - NASASpaceflight.com
Jun 18, 2021 2 mins, 40 secs

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Europa, an icy Jovian moon that likely possesses an ocean beneath its icy crust, may have an interior that is hot enough to produce volcanic activity on its seafloor.

Marie Běhounková of Charles University in the Czech Republic, developed their own 3D models of Europa’s interior and heating transfer properties to investigate the possibility of volcanism on Europa’s ocean floor given other volcanism seen in the Jovian system.

These volcanoes would form due to the melting of Europa’s interior and heat transfer from the rocky interior of Europa to the seafloor

Their model is the most detailed of Europa’s interior ever developed and represents the internal heat production and transfer throughout the moon’s history

A prime candidate for the mechanism behind Europa’s heating is tidal forces imparted to it via gravitational interactions with Jupiter, Io, and Ganymede

“From a point of view of numerical modeling for moons and planets, tidal heating is more difficult to model because of the interaction with other bodies

These nudges create tidal forces that translate to the heating of the body’s interior

It’s that interaction that led Běhounková et al.’s research toward the conclusion that this resonance and the associate tidal forces can cause increased periods of volcanic activity — called magmatic pulses — on Europa

Jupiter's moon Europa is known for its icy crust—but the ocean beneath could house heat-spewing volcanoes, as a future @NASA mission will explore >> https://t.co/XdwP99KQ9v @NASAJPL pic.twitter.com/omVpDkN2se

Běhounková and her team shows that Europa’s eccentricity evolution is periodic, which suggests increased periods of magmatic pulses on the moon

However, tidal forces created by the Laplace resonance and Europa’s changing eccentricity has not always been the leading cause of internal melting

For the first few billion years of the moon’s formation, radiogenic power would have been the main cause of mantle melting and volcanism on the Jovian moon

However, due to radiogenic decay, this source of heating ends up having less control over Europa’s internal melting rate over the course of the moon’s evolution, allowing orbital eccentricity and the Laplace resonance effects to take over as the more dominate mechanisms

Based on the model created by Běhounková et al., Europa’s heating from tidal forces is not uniformly distributed around its oceanic surface

High latitude regions near the poles are much more prone to tidal heating melting of rock and associated volcanism than at the equatorial regions, where cold downwellings typically prohibit enhanced amounts of melting to occur

So what does this all mean, and why is this model of Europa’s heating environment and volcanic history (and present) so important

They continue, stating, “Jupiter’s icy moon Europa harbors underneath tectonically modified ice shell (Figueredo & Greeley, 2004; Kattenhorn & Prockter, 2014) a salty ocean (Kivelson et al., 2000) in direct contact with a rocky interior that may still be active (Moore & Hussmann, 2009)

While these spacecraft do not feature the proper instruments needed to perform a detailed study of seafloor volcanism on the Jovian moons, they can still be incredibly helpful in unlocking Europa’s heating and volcanism history

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