Coupled Convection and Tidal Dissipation in Europa's Ice Shell with Newtonian and Non-Newtonian Viscosity

Details Coupled Convection and Tidal Dissipation in Europa's Ice Shell with Newtonian and Non-Newtonian Viscosity Coupled Convection and Tidal Dissipation in Europa's Ice Shell with Newtonian and Non-Newtonian Viscosity

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.5103h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #51.03

Physics

Geophysics

Scientific paper

Many authors have performed numerical simulations to study the thermal convection in Europa's ice shell. Most of these studies have included a tidal heating that is either constant or depends only on local temperature, following the predictions of an isothermal Maxwell model with zero spatial dimensions. To self-consistently determine how convection interacts with tidal heating resulting from the time-evolving heterogeneous temperature field, we coupled viscoelastic simulations of oscillatory tidal flexing (using Tekton) with simulations of convection (using ConMan) in 2D Cartesian geometry. To extend our earlier research, both Newtonian and non-Newtonian rheology were implemented in these simulations. Our simulations show that the tidal dissipation rate resulting from a heterogeneous temperature can have a strong impact on thermal convection in Europa's ice shell. Tidal dissipation can trigger convection to occur at a lower critical Rayleigh number than that predicted by models without tidal dissipation. A pre-existing weak zone strongly promotes the concentration of tidal dissipation, leading to localized temperature increases of up to 50-100 K. These fully coupled calculations support the idea that spatially variable tidal dissipation could lead locally to high temperatures, partial melting, and play an important role in the formation of ridges, chaos, and other features. This work was supported by grant NNX06AC41G from the NASA Planetary Geology and Geophysics Research Program.

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