Shallow Pockets of Water Under the ice on Europa Could Bring Life Close to its Surface universetoday storybywill
As they explain in their study, the research was motivated by a similarity the team noticed during a presentation at Standford. While discussing Europa’s double-ridges, Culberg noticed how similar these landforms were to features they had studied extensively in northern Greenland. Between 2015 and 2017, NASA collected ground-penetrating radar data of the region as part of, an aerial observation campaign that conducts geophysical studies of the growth and retreat of ice sheets.
The similarities came as a surprise to the team because of how different Earth’s land-based subsurface is compared to Europa’s subsurface ocean of liquid water.
Since then, however, scientists have not been able to come up with a definitive explanation of how these features formed. By conducting a comparative analysis between the radar data collected by Operation IceBridge and the geophysical data they had for Europa, the team could conceive a possible answer. As Culberg“In Greenland, this double ridge formed in a place where water from surface lakes and streams frequently drains into the near-surface and refreezes.