Liquid Water and Thermal Activity of Enceladus' South Polar Terrain

Details Liquid Water and Thermal Activity of Enceladus' South Polar Terrain Liquid Water and Thermal Activity of Enceladus' South Polar Terrain

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p13d..03b&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P13D-03

Mathematics

Logic

5422 Ices, 5430 Interiors (8147), 5455 Origin And Evolution, 5480 Volcanism (6063, 8148, 8450)

Scientific paper

The endogenic activity on Enceladus is only located on a specific region at the south pole, from which jets of water vapor and ice particles have been observed. Heat power required to sustain such an activity over geologic timescales remains problematic. In a recent study, we show that only interior models with a liquid water layer at depth can explain the observed magnitude of dissipation and its particular location at the south pole (Tobie et al., Icarus, 2008). Here, we investigate the thermal stability of a localized liquid water reservoir at the rock-ice interface by performing simulations of thermal convection in three-dimensional spherical geometry. Preliminary results indicate that a total power ranging between 2.4 GW and 8 GW, comparable to the typical tidal dissipation value expected in the south polar region, is required to sustain a localized liquid zone. We are currently coupling our 3D viscoelastic tidal dissipation model to the 3D thermal convection code in order to precisely determine the associated tidal dissipation field. Preliminary results will be presented. In parallel, we investigate the likelihood of short resurfacing events by incorporating a self-lubricating, simple damage rheology using a 2D cartesian version of the code. When stress accumulation leads to the rupture of the lithosphere, a heat flow of about 200 mW.m-2, comparable to the values observed over the south pole, is observed during a relatively short period of time (< 500 kyr).

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