The icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa may contain a body of water the size of the Great Lakes sitting just 1.8 miles below the surface. If confirmed, the findings could heat up the prospects of finding alien life on the chilly moon.
Deep underneath its frozen exterior, Europa is known to house a vast ocean, with two to three times the volume of Earth’s oceans. And researchers have previously speculated that small amounts of water might exist near the moon’s surface in pores or cracks.
“Now we’ve found evidence that there are giant liquid lakes perched inside the ice shell,†said planetary scientist Britney Schmidt from the University of Texas at Austin and lead author on the paper, which appears in Nature on Nov. 17.
Looking at data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft — which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 — Schmidt and her team identified a region called Thera Macula that sits 1,300 feet lower than the surrounding surface.
A hypothetical visitor to Europa standing on the edge of Thera Macula would look down at a choppy, brownish field of ice full of knobs and spires, and see tall icebergs trapped here and there. Extrapolating from analogous situations occurring in Greenland or Antarctic ice, the researchers developed a...
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