Almost impossible to reach ocean: Europa may hold more water than Earth

Representative Image of Europa's hidden ocean beneath its icy surface (AI-generated image) Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons, may hold more liquid water than all of Earth's oceans combined, sealed beneath a thick shell of ice. For years, one of the most promising ideas for studying that hidden ocean was that water rising through cracks in the ice might collect in shallow pockets closer to the surface, giving spacecraft an easier target to sample than drilling miles down to the ocean itself. A new study led by Rutgers University planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha suggests that shortcut may not work the way scientists hoped. Computer simulations of water moving through narrow fractures in Europa's ice found that the water loses heat so fast it likely freezes solid long before it ever reaches the surface.What the new simulations actually testedAccording to a Rutgers University press release, Ojha and his colleagues modelled how ocean water might travel upward through cracks in Europa's ice shell, structures called dikes, the same term used for similar cracks that carry magma toward the surface in volcanic systems on Earth. The comparison to Earth's volcanoes, known as cryovolcanism wh...