Do Titan's mountains betray the late acquisition of its current atmosphere?

Details Do Titan's mountains betray the late acquisition of its current atmosphere? Do Titan's mountains betray the late acquisition of its current atmosphere?

Oct 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011epsc.conf..188m&link_type=abstract

EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2011, held 2-7 October 2011 in Nantes, France. http://meetings.copernicus.org/epsc-dps2011, p.188

Computer Science

Scientific paper

Titan may have acquired its massive atmosphere relatively recently in solar system history [1,2,3,4]. Prior to that time, Titan would have been nearly airless, with its volatiles frozen or sequestered. Present-day Titan experiences only small (~4 K) pole-to-equator variations, owing to efficient heat transport via the thick atmosphere [5]; these temperature variations would have been much larger (~ 20 K) in the absence of an atmosphere. If Titan's ice shell is conductive, the change in surface temperature associated with the development of an atmosphere would have led to changes in shell thickness. In particular, the poles would move down (inducing compression) while the equator would move up. Figure 1 shows the predicted change in surface elevation as a result of the change in surface temperature, using the numerical conductive shell thickness model of [6].

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