Magic Islands Options

[stevesliva]

Generic thread title, struggled with where to put this.

https://www.utsa.edu/today/2024/01/story/pr...turns-moon.html

JANUARY 5, 2024 — Titan’s “magic islands” are likely floating chunks of porous, icy organic solids, a new study by UTSA professor Xinting Yu finds, pivoting from previous work suggesting they were gas bubbles

[HSchirmer]

Generic thread title, struggled with where to put this.

Perhaps a general topic of "weird density effects of cryo-geology"?

While not quite the floating mountains of YES-album-cover-art / Patrick Woodroffe, or the Avatar's movies Halleluiah-Mountains on Pandora, you do see something similar on Pluto with the shards of the al-Idrisi ice-mountains floating away across a lugubrious nitrogen sea...

A meteorologic cycle on Titan involving methane/ethane snow & slush raises some REALLY interesting opportunities for organic chemistry, catalysts, and daisy chaining catalytic loops to create tholins. See "Origins of Order" and other works on complexity theory from Santa Fe Institute and prebiotic autocatalytic networks...
It helps to think of the rich mix of 'ices' which make up the minerals from earth. Starting from a molten ball of magma containing metal oxides (MgO, CaO, K2O, Na2O) and silica oxide SiO2; as things cool you freeze out metal-oxide "ices" as basalt and silica-oxides "ices" as quartz. Subduction from plate tectonics introduces H2O under high pressure and temperature which further 'crack/catalyze' the minerals and refine then into a low-density silicate rich continental crust floating on a high-density basalt rich oceanic crust. Crustal minerals are exposed to atmospheric weathering, which converts silica crystals into polycyclic sheets clays. Eventually, flowing liquid collects tiny flecks of all these minerals and dumps them into a riverine delta containing millions of different mineral crystals (e.g. catalysts) and these tiny sedimentary grains gain an enormous surface area, creating the perfect place for liquid phase catalytic chemistry.

We should expect essentially the same processes on Titan, just with a different set of 'ices' and probably clathrates instead of clays. That's the really mind-blowing part, thinking about the sorts of 'igneous', 'sedimentary', and 'metamorphic' rocks you'd expect to see, when rocks are made out of materials that we breath in here on Earth.