Water plumes over Europa |
Water plumes over Europa |
Dec 12 2013, 04:55 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 401 Joined: 5-January 07 From: Manchester England Member No.: 1563 |
This seems like the relevant place to post this (could be wrong): Water plumes from Europa? Apologies if it's already been up. The link to the Science article at the bottom doesn't work for me, does anyone have a working link to the original? Cheers.
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Jan 1 2014, 05:12 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
So, observed species abundances reflect the end result of a process of emission of some carbon species, the dissociation of those species in the radiation environment, and finally the recombination of some species (as allowed by the environment) and the emplacement of these recombined species on the surface?
Just trying to wrap my mind around the most likely process. Seems to me that modern science offers a lot of theoretical concepts that are weak on the actual processes you have to have to get to the current observed conditions, which is why I'm always harping on the process side of things. -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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Jan 3 2014, 06:57 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
Other Doug,
I think it's useful to consider the relative rates of processes on the surface of a world. We have few visible craters on Earth because erosion and tectonics both work faster than impact cratering. On Europa, the effects of radiation work fastest, although those obviously alter only the immediate surface. Recycling of crustal material (faults, occasional melt-through) is next fastest. Then the flux of major impactors comes after that. I've read enough about Europa to know that there are certainly unknowns and seemingly unknowable unknowns (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld), or at least internal parameters that cannot be deduced unless we get hard data about the interior of a kind we don't have, or someone comes up with new and clever ways of interpreting the clues we have. It is generally the case that the interior properties of worlds are hard to pin down without a tremendous amount of in situ seismographic, etc, data of a kind we have only for Earth and to a lesser extent the Moon and a far lesser extent Mars. |
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