Updated Titan Map Options

[alan]

I'm looking for a recent map ot Titan. Steve Albers's page links to one done by Fridger Schrempp in April 2005. Cassini has done a dozen flybys since then. Does anyone know if an updated map has been released.

[nprev]

Yeah, JR--I used to live in Tucson, and that's exactly the same impression I got. The entire area is usually dry as a bone all year until monsoon season hits in June/July, and then it's flash-flood time which produces/reinforces all these massive arroyos. Perhaps the same thing happens in Titan's equatorial regions every 14.5 terrestrial years or so...

[Juramike]

Does anyone out there have a hypothesis/explanation for the distinctly swoopy pattern of the overall look of the margin of the of the bright terrain against the dark terrain?

It seems that the bright features have an almost parallel aerodynamic look to them. This is particulary evident in the margins around Shangri-La (basin).

This has been fascinating me since the first pass: to my eyes, they look almost like a terrestrial fjord landscape.

Could this be resulting from wind deposition of upland (bright) material from cryovolcanic airfall?
Or could this be from wind deposition of the organic “shizzle” which piles up downwind against the bright material?
Or is it possible that there has been an equivalent of a past ice age on Titan, with methane snows piling up, forming methane glaciers, and coming down off Xanadu and other upland terrains?

Any ideas?

-Mike

[Bob Shaw]

Does anyone out there have a hypothesis/explanation for the distinctly swoopy pattern of the overall look of the margin of the of the bright terrain against the dark terrain?

It seems that the bright features have an almost parallel aerodynamic look to them. This is particulary evident in the margins around Shangri-La (basin).

This has been fascinating me since the first pass: to my eyes, they look almost like a terrestrial fjord landscape.

-Mike

Mike:

I don't quite know what 'swoopy' landforms are like, but as for the rest it looks just like the west coast of Scotland - a fjord landscape... ...AIRC, 'Scotland' was indeed one of the nicknames used back in the early days!


Bob Shaw

[JRehling]

Mike:

I don't quite know what 'swoopy' landforms are like, but as for the rest it looks just like the west coast of Scotland - a fjord landscape... ...AIRC, 'Scotland' was indeed one of the nicknames used back in the early days!
Bob Shaw

I just went back to the Planetary Sciences Yahoo! group and saw that at 4:09pm on July 2, 2004, I posted:

"Image N00006513.jpg... first thing I think of is a map of Scotland."

That was about 2 1/2 hours after the first images came down. Took a while to de-haze them enough.

My half-considered explanation for the Scottish shape would be that tectonic uplift in this area caused a lot of faulting with the same orientation, with the crust buckling according to different spatial frequencies. Large-scale buckles give the overall shape of Xanadu's northwestern "coast" while small-scale buckles make the whole thing look like corduroy... as do various locations up the Pacific Coast of the Americas, Scotland, and other places on Earth.

One of the interesting things is that Xanadu has moderately dark "lochs" near but not part of (or as dark as) Shangri-La. Probably the same sediments that darkened Shangri-La, but in lesser amounts.

[Juramike]

My half-considered explanation for the Scottish shape would be that tectonic uplift in this area caused a lot of faulting with the same orientation, with the crust buckling according to different spatial frequencies. Large-scale buckles give the overall shape of Xanadu's northwestern "coast" while small-scale buckles make the whole thing look like corduroy... as do various locations up the Pacific Coast of the Americas, Scotland, and other places on Earth.

One of the interesting things is that Xanadu has moderately dark "lochs" near but not part of (or as dark as) Shangri-La. Probably the same sediments that darkened Shangri-La, but in lesser amounts.

So, the tectonic uplift causes the general buckling....and then the infilling of the lowland basins by the dark material causes a ria (drowned valley) topography?

In this case the drowning of the valleys is caused not by a rise in seawater (like on Earth), but by the gradual infilling of the the dark material basins due to the organic "schizzle" raining down?

[Thus the dark lochs are shallower accumulations of the organic ooze.]

Or is a glacial event still a possibility?

-Mike