Titan's global lake distribution and implied hydrocarbon hydrology from Cassini SAR imagery and topography

Details Titan's global lake distribution and implied hydrocarbon hydrology from Cassini SAR imagery and topography Titan's global lake distribution and implied hydrocarbon hydrology from Cassini SAR imagery and topography

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p11d..07h&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P11D-07

Mathematics

Logic

1825 Geomorphology: Fluvial (1625), 5419 Hydrology And Fluvial Processes, 5462 Polar Regions, 5464 Remote Sensing, 6281 Titan

Scientific paper

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of Titan's polar regions reveal quasi-circular to complex features which are interpreted to be liquid hydrocarbon lakes. The global distribution and relative topography of observed lake features is used to study methane transport in Titan's hydrologic cycle. At the end of Cassini's primary mission, the SAR dataset covers ~34% of the surface (~27% at 350 m/pixel or better) and indicates multiple lake morphologies which are correlated across the observed polar region. Lake frequency in the north is an order of magnitude higher than in the south, suggesting a fundamental difference in methane transport and storage. Northern lakes vary from < 10 to more than 100,000 km2 and are limited to latitudes above 55N where 60% of the surface has been observed, as opposed to 19% below 55S. Filled lakes take up ~10% of the observed area in the north and ~1% in the south. Southern features are dominated by Ontario Lacus (18000 km2), observed by the Imaging Science Subsystem, which is ~20 times larger than the sum of all southern lakes observed by the radar to date. The location and character of hydrologic features can be used to constrain parameters associated with methane evaporation, runoff, and subsurface transport in Titan's hydrologic cycle. Lakes are expected to be a mixture of primarily methane, ethane, and nitrogen. Methane will evaporate in Titan's atmosphere while ethane and nitrogen are comparatively stable. All three liquids can interact with a porous regolith through subsurface flow. Sartopo, topographic information derived from overlapping beams patterns in the Cassini RADAR, is used to compare observed lake morphologies to expected subsurface transport directions. As predicted, the large seas found between 100E and 140E appear to be the lowest point in the region. The north polar region is the most topographically varying terrain observed on Titan to date. Relative elevations are correlated to observed lake classifications and show that lakes do not lie on a global equipotential surface. While most areas show the expected relationship of empty above filled lakes, some areas have shown empty lakes topographically below filled lakes in a state of hydrologic disequilibrium. Additional radar passes, obtained during Cassini's extended mission, will provide an opportunity to observe lake level change in these areas and place limits on the permeability of the local regolith.

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