Titan's changing lakes Options

[ngunn]

Today's big news?
http://ciclops.org/view/5471/CASSINI_FINDS...ILL_TITAN_LAKES

Changes in the south polar region were announced late last year. Is there more to this story now??

[volcanopele]

Here are some the associated graphics:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11147
This shows the changes that we are highlighting in this paper. Basically, between July 2004 and June 2005, a 31,000 sq. km area of the south polar region of Titan went from being nondescript to being a patchwork of dark features. These darkening is thought to result from the deposition of liquid methane and dark sediment in this area. The mostly likely mechanism for this change is that a major rainstorm in the 11 months between the observations rained out, filling a low-land region, a playa, within a shallow layer of liquid methane.

The most likely storm to cause this was a huge storm system seen from the ground and by ISS in early October 2004. Based on ISS observations, the most intense part of the storm (as determined by the brightest part of the storm which likely represents the area with the greatest cloud heights) on October 8, 2004 was directly over this region.

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11146
This is the labeled version of my August 2008 map. Of particular interest in this map is the polar coverage we are now achieving. In the north polar region, we see a field of dark spots on the leading hemisphere and several large methane seas (Kraken Mare, Ligeia Mare, and Punga Mare). These features were previously seen by RADAR and likely represent lakes. The number of dark features seen in the south polar region exceed those seen by RADAR in its swaths of the region, suggesting that some have dried up since 2005.