Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Dec 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p11d..06m&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P11D-06
Mathematics
Logic
6281 Titan
Scientific paper
Instead of being endogenically active, Titan's interior may be cold and dead. Those landforms on Titan that are unambiguously identifiable can all be explained by exogenic processes (aeolian, fluvial, impact cratering, and mass wasting). At the scale of available imaging data, the surface is dominated by vast dune ergs and by fluvial erosion, transportation, and deposition. The sparse distribution of recognizable impact craters (themselves exogenic) is consistent with the presence of aeolian and fluvial activity sufficient to cover and or erode smaller craters, leaving only large ones. Previous suggestions of endogenically produced landforms have been, without exception, inconclusively identified. Features suggested to be cryovolcanic flows may be debris flows and other mass movements, facilitated by hydrocarbon-fluidized unconsolidated materials. Ganesa Macula has been suggested as a putative cryovolcanic dome, but it may simply be an impact structure that contains radar-dark dune or mass-wasted materials. Mountains, which are heavily modified by fluvial and mass wasting processes, could have formed as the scarps of large impact features and/or by slow contraction due to global cooling and freezing of an internal ammonia-water ocean, rather than by endogenically powered orogeny. A cold and inactive interior is consistent with an internal ammonia-water ocean, which has a peritectic temperature of 173K, easily obtained in Titan by radioactive decay alone in the absence of tidal heating. Titan's orbital eccentricity should have damped if its interior is warm and dissipative; instead, its high eccentricity can be ancient if the interior is assumed to be cold and non-dissipative. Indeed, it has been suggested that Titan may be non-hydrostatic, consistent with a thick ice shell and a cold and rigid interior. We suggest that the satellite most akin to Titan may be Callisto. Like Callisto, which may have formed relatively slowly in the outer circumjovian accretion disk, Titan might have accreted relatively cold. Without being in a forced resonance, Titan's interior may have never undergone significant tidal heating. Analogous to Callisto's tenuous CO2 atmosphere, believed to be generated by sublimation of interior ices, interior clathrated methane within Titan may slowly diffuse outward from the cold interior, rather than the atmosphere being replenished by cryovolcanism. The hypothesis that Titan is "Callisto with weather" -- with geological processes that are principally exogenic -- can be tested through geophysical and thermal modeling, and by modeling the evolution of landscapes that are shaped by exogenic processes alone.
Moore Jeffery M.
Pappalardo Robert T.
No associations
LandOfFree
Titan: Callisto With Weather? does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.
If you have personal experience with Titan: Callisto With Weather?, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Titan: Callisto With Weather? will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1234838