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Fwd: Ocean tides create "cycloids" on Europa


UA SCIENTISTS SAY OCEAN TIDES
CREATE EUROPA'S UNIQUE 'CYCLOID' CRACKS
(From Lori Stiles, UA News Services)

-- Sent Sept. 16, 1999 (11 a.m. MST) --


Contact:
Gregory V. Hoppa
520-621-6520 (pager: 520-446-9127)
hoppa@lpl.arizona.edu



TUCSON, Ariz. -- When Voyager flew by Jupiter's moon Europa in 1979, it
photographed geological surface features unlike any others ever seen in the
solar system. Near Europašs south pole, chains of scalloped lines joined
arc-to-arc at the cusp ran for hundreds of miles across the frozen,
fractured surface.

Until now, there have been no good ideas as to what formed these bizarre
"cycloidal" features, or "flexi," as they were officially dubbed by the
International Astronomical Union.

Now, planetary scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson provide a
model for how these features are created. It is perhaps the most convincing
evidence yet for a global ocean. They report on it in today's issue of
Science (Sept. 17).

Scientists know that Europa has a 100-mile-thick layer of water -- 20 times
thicker than the Earth's oceans -- but the visible top layer is frozen. This
new strong evidence for a liquid global ocean below the surface makes Europa
a prime target in the search for life beyond Earth.

Gregory V. Hoppa, B. Randall Tufts, Richard Greenberg and Paul E. Geissler
of the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory theorize that cycloidal cracks form
in Europašs solid-ice surface with the daily rise and fall of tides in the
subsurface ocean. They painstaking modeled and scrutinized images of Europa
taken by the Galileo spacecraft between 1996 and 1999. The new images show
that cycloidal cracks and ridges are widely distributed over all of the
moon.

Hoppa has posted images and explanatory animation of cycloidal crack
formation on the web site:
< http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~hoppa/science.html >

Europa is about the size of our moon. Tidal stresses on its ice-covered
ocean ebb and flow
as it orbits Jupiter, which is 300 times as massive as Earth. According to
the UA researchersš model, Europa's ocean tides rise and fall a distance of
30 meters. By comparison, tides at most ocean beaches on Earth rise and fall
1 to 2 meters, or 4 to 6 feet.

"What causes the cycloid to form is that Europa is in a slightly eccentric
orbit because of Io and Ganymede (other Jovian moons). Sometimes Europa is a
little closer, other times a little farther from Jupiter. When Europa is
closer to Jupiter, the tides are higher because Jupiter is pulling on it
more. When Europa is farther, the tides fall because Jupiteršs force falls.
This causes Europa's ice shell to flex."


The UA model shows that when tidal stress reaches the tensile strength of
ice, the ice begins to crack. It takes very little stress to form the
initial crack ­ something like the force it takes to break a saltine cracker
-- because Europa's surface ice is weakened by countless linear fractures.

The crack propagates relatively slowly across the ever-changing stress
field. It moves following a curving path until stress drops below the
tensile strength of the ice, when it halts. A few hours later, when tidal
stress again exceeds the tensile strength of ice, the crack begins a new
curve in another direction.

"You could probably walk along with the advancing tip of a crack as it was
forming ­- if you could survive Europašs
radiation environment," Hoppa said. "And while there's not enough air to
carry sound, you would definitely feel
vibrations as it formed."

One of their most striking conclusions is that each arc segment forms in 3.5
days ­ the time it takes Europa to make one complete orbit around Jupiter.
The cycloids faithfully record the 85-hour daily flexing of Europašs ice
shell just as trees faithfully record each growing season in annual rings.

"We can look at a crack that has 4 or 5 cusps, each formed every 3.5 days,
and know that the entire chain formed in about 2.5 weeks," Hoppa said.

Arc segments in the cycloid, each ranging from 75 km to 200 km long, form
cracks stretching a thousand kilometers over the ice in a fraction of an
instant in geological time. Eventually, cracks evolve into ridges, typically
double ridges, according to the UA model.

The scientists also can determine which direction the cracks traveled as
they formed based on the orientation of the arcs and the hemisphere in which
they are found.

"What amazes me about this is just how long these features have been a
mystery," Hoppa said. "We've been staring at pictures of them for 20 years,
since Voyager. We didn't know what made them. And it seems what they've been
telling us all along is that an ocean was there when these things formed."

********


Related links:
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~hoppa/science.html

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