Earlier this year, researchers warned against the dangers of “fluffy ice” on Europa’s surface. If unaccounted for, missions headed to Jupiter’s moon could drown themselves in its deep, icy oceans. A new study suggests that this won’t happen—but for reasons that won’t make our Europa trips any easier. A paper published yesterday in Nature Astronomy challenges the assumption that the shallow pools of water on Europa’s surface represent a direct access route to the moon’s deep, icy oceans. In theory, this supposed access route could make it easier for a probe to explore how liquid water from Europa’s deep oceans traveled through cracks in the ice to the surface. Unfortunately, we’re not sure if this even happens. “This is exactly what we wanted to test,” Lujendra Ojha, the study’s first author and an earth scientist at Rutgers University, told Gizmodo. “In particular, we asked whether the water could travel this distance before losing enough heat to freeze and whether the fractures could remain open long enough to transport a meaningful amount of water.”
Prospects real icy For the study, Ojha and colleagues simulated the movement and cooling of water inside the fractures of Europa’s icy shell. In a Rutgers statement, Ojha explained that earlier models “often treated water rising through Europa’s ice as if it moved in a relatively orderly way.” They also draw an analogy between volcanoes and icy volcanoes, although there are “fundamental” differences between ice, liquid water, lava, and volcanoes, he added.
