{"id":1979,"date":"2011-12-06T00:51:13","date_gmt":"2011-12-06T00:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/?p=1979"},"modified":"2021-01-18T01:40:07","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T09:40:07","slug":"cracked-ice-on-europa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/?p=1979","title":{"rendered":"Cracked ice on Europa caused by tidal flexing from Jupiter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/rp-europa.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1980 aligncenter\" title=\"rp-europa\" src=\"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/rp-europa.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"576\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/rp-europa.jpg 960w, http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/rp-europa-300x103.jpg 300w, http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/rp-europa-600x207.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 576px) 100vw, 576px\" \/><\/a>The surface of Jupiter&#8217;s satellite Europa, the second large moon from the planet, is cracked.\u00a0 Reflection spectra show that the surface material is mostly clean ice, while images show very few impact craters, indicating that the surface is young.\u00a0 In addition, several lines of evidence show that Europa possesses a subsurface ocean of liquid water (the best evidence, from induced currents that flow in Europa as it cuts through Jupiter&#8217;s magnetosphere, was discovered by UCLA scientists B. Khurana and M. Kivelson).\u00a0 Together, the known properties suggest that the surface is a bit like the arctic polar cap of the Earth, with ice sheets floating on water and stress-cracked into polygonal platelets that sometimes collide and may even overturn.\u00a0 The global scale cracks in the picture are a few kilometers wide and a few 100 meters deep, and spectrally distinguished from their surroundings by entrained salts and other materials presumably oozed up from below.\u00a0 These large-scale cracks form patterns dictated by global stresses, caused by planetary perturbations as Europa orbits Jupiter.\u00a0 Smaller scale cracks and other morphological features indicate that Europa&#8217;s ice shell may be as thin as 3 km, in places.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The surface of Jupiter&#8217;s satellite Europa, the second large moon from the planet, is cracked.\u00a0 Reflection spectra show that the surface material is mostly clean ice, while images show very few impact craters, indicating that the surface is young.\u00a0 In addition, several lines of evidence show that Europa possesses a subsurface ocean of liquid water &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/?p=1979\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Cracked ice on Europa caused by tidal flexing from Jupiter&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[296],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1979"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13232,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions\/13232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/planets.ucla.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}