Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. Originally from Prague, the Czech Republic, she spent the first seven years of her career working as a reporter, script-writer and presenter for various TV programmes of the Czech Public Service Television.
The thickness of ice shells covering our solar system's ocean-bearing moons could provide hints about whether these mysterious bodies may harbor life, a new study suggests.
"If we can measure the thickness variation across these ice shells, then we're able to get temperature constraints on the oceans, which there's really no other way yet to do without drilling into them," Britney Schmidt, associate professor of astronomy and earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University and lead author of the study,."This gives us another tool for trying to figure out how these oceans work.
The team's Antarctic observations showed that the ice crust above the ocean and the underlying mass of water interact through a process dubbed ice pumping. Differences in ice thickness, the researchers say, mean the liquid water is subject to various amounts of pressure, which affects the water's melting and freezing point. With a thicker layer of ice above, the pressure is higher and the freezing point decreases, which means that submerged ice can sometimes melt.
"There's a connection between the shape of the ice shell and the temperature in the ocean," Schmidt said."This is a new way to get more insight from ice shell measurements that we hope to be able to get for Europa and other worlds."Measurements of the Enceladus ice shell conducted by NASA's Cassini probe, which orbited Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017, suggest the moon's subsurface ocean may have a temperature between 30 and 29.7 degrees Fahrenheit .
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