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Magic Islands
stevesliva
post Jan 13 2024, 01:25 AM
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Generic thread title, struggled with where to put this.

https://www.utsa.edu/today/2024/01/story/pr...turns-moon.html
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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
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Bill Harris
post Jan 28 2024, 06:49 AM
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HSchirmer, relating terrestrial magma to the rich ices on Titan is a brilliant observation. I'll need to read up on that.
The Dragonfly mission will answer so many questions about Titan as well as raise so many more.

--Bill


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HSchirmer
post Jan 29 2024, 12:01 PM
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QUOTE (Bill Harris)
HSchirmer, relating terrestrial magma to the rich ices on Titan is a brilliant observation. --Bill

Thanks, although this analogy was pointed out to me a long time ago, when I was helping U-Penn botanists and a Penn-State geologist get landowner permission for biodiversity surveys.

The geologist was interested in the contact zone between intrusive diabase and shales, especially the grain sizes and crossbedding at the bottom of the magma chamber.
When I asked about fine layering and bedding in the diabase, the geologist explained that the magma chamber was like a snow-globe; the layers I was seeing in solid rock were mineral crystals that 'snowed out' as the magma chamber cooled, blown into drifts by convection currents, which eventually avalanched down the sides of the magma chamber to form the swirling pattern that was now set in stone.

Amazing to perceive an 'estuary' of mineral grains in a magma chamber, with different generations of mineral grains snowing down as the liquid cools and minerals fractionate out.
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