Beneath its glossy veneer, Europa's frozen crust might be carved into something resembling Swiss cheese, with enormous cavities of liquid water tucked into the rock-hard ice.
One of the buried lakes on Jupiter's watery moon, lurking a few kilometers below a region called Thera Macula, contains at least as much water as the U.S. Great Lakes, scientists report online November 16 in Nature.
These hidden Europan reservoirs would explain jumbled, chaotic surface features that have puzzled scientists for more than a decade. The existence of such cavities implies vigorous mixing of materials between Europa's frigid surface and the sloshing ocean hiding beneath a tantalizing prospect for scientists considering whether life could evolve on the jovian moon.
“It would be great if these lakes harbored life. But even if they didn't, they say that Europa is doing something interesting and active right now,” says planetary scientist and study coauthor Britney Schmidt of University of Texas at Austin.
Schmidt and her colleagues uncovered the lakes while considering how chaotic regions on Europa, such as Conamara Chaos, might form. The team compared archival images of these tangled terrains with similar landforms on Earth: fractured, collapsing Antarctic ice shelves and icy caps perched atop subglacial Icelandic volcanoes. Interacting water and ice craft these terrestrial jumbles, and similar processes can explain observations on Europa.
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