Europa, a moon of the planet Jupiter, could retain pockets of water just under its icy surface, according to scientists basing their hypothesis on the observation of the surface of Greenland.
Europa is a prime candidate for the search for extraterrestrial life in the solar system, due to the supposed presence of an ocean of liquid water. But the latter would be located under a thick layer of ice, up to 20 to 30 kilometers below the surface, according to data collected by space probes.
However, part of this water could be much closer to the surface than imagined, according to the study published Tuesday in Nature communications, which underlines that Europa is “young and geologically active”.
Scientists have put forward several hypotheses to explain their formation, including an interaction between the inner ocean and the layer of ice that covers it. But the difficulty for water to pass through such a thick surface has led to speculation that the formation of the ridges takes place with pockets of water located just below the surface.
And this was observed by a team of geophysicists from the American University of Stanford, in Greenland, an island mainly covered with ice.
There they discovered “a double ridge of ice that is similar in shape to the double ridges found on Europa”, explained Riley Culberg, lead author of the study, noting that this ridge is about 800 meters long. long with an average height of 2.1 meters and is located about 60 km from the coast in northwestern Greenland. Two space missions are planned in this regard from 2030: Europa Clipper, for NASA, will be equipped with a radar similar to that used to study Greenland, and JUICE, for the European Space Agency (ESA), will look it also on Europa as well as on the other two icy moons of Jupiter, Io and Ganymede.