3 ms·

I'd never considered the pressure under an ice cap... it would scale with depth, no? So a water channel within the ice (going "up" from the sea below) would ha

• mattlondon 2y ago
  I would imagine the water channel would re-freeze fairly rapidly, so you'd end up with a "bubble" of liquid water around the thing slowly melting itself down.
  • ethbr1 2y ago
    Point. Is ice sufficiently plastic to exert pressure with depth? I honestly don't know. E.g. What would the pressure of a bubble of water under 1km of ice vs 15km of ice?
    • nick238 2y ago
      The ice clearly moves, as Europa's surface isn't just same as an airless, solid ball-of-rock's default: craters, but has all sorts of features that reshape the surface, so given enough time, it'll equilibrate. (What 'enough' means is left as an exercise to the reader). There are papers[1] that discuss the ice properties, but it's hard to get a specific answer out of them. There have to be tons of research papers out there about the design criteria for melt-drill probes like this, for Europa, Enceladus, and others. [1]: https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/draft5.pdf https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/draft5.pdf