Rings and moons articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • Letter |

    Titan’s equatorial dunes propagate eastwards, whereas Titan’s surface winds blow towards the West. Atmospheric simulations suggest that tropical methane storms generate strong eastward gusts that may dominate sand transport on Titan’s surface.

    • Benjamin Charnay
    • , Erika Barth
    •  & Antoine Lucas

  • Letter |

    Linear sand dunes on equatorial Titan are shaped by winds. The morphologies of smaller dunes that have been reoriented with respect to the linear dune crests suggest that winds shift with long-term orbitally driven climate cycles on Titan.

    • Ryan C. Ewing
    • , Alex G. Hayes
    •  & Antoine Lucas

  • News & Views |

    Jupiter's icy moon Europa is criss-crossed by extensional features. A tectonic reconstruction suggests that Europa's extension is balanced by subduction — if so, Earth may not be the only planetary body with a plate tectonic system.

    • Michelle M. Selvans

  • Article |

    Despite widespread evidence for extension, there have been few signs of contraction on the icy surface of Jupiter’s Europa. Evidence for a subduction-like convergent boundary suggests that Europa may have active plate tectonics.

    • Simon A. Kattenhorn
    •  & Louise M. Prockter

  • Letter |

    As northern summer solstice nears on Saturn’s moon Titan, dynamic processes on its surface are expected. Recent observations by the Cassini spacecraft reveal transient bright features in or on a Titan sea that are consistent with an ephemeral phenomenon such as waves.

    • J. D. Hofgartner
    • , A. G. Hayes
    •  & C. Wood

  • News & Views |

    Liquid water may lurk beneath the frozen surfaces of Jupiter's moon Europa and other icy worlds. Extending ocean science beyond Earth, planetary oceanographers are linking Europa's ocean dynamics to its enigmatic surface geology.

    • Jason Goodman

  • Letter |

    On Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, enigmatic chaos terrain—where the icy crust is cut by a jumble of ridges and cracks—occurs most commonly at lower latitudes. Simulations of convection in the ocean underlying Europa’s icy crust suggest that ocean dynamics can control an enhanced flow of heat to Europa’s equatorial surface, and hence geological activity.

    • K. M. Soderlund
    • , B. E. Schmidt
    •  & D. D. Blankenship

  • Letter |

    Unusual minerals observed in lunar craters were thought to originate from beneath the Moon’s surface. Numerical simulations show that rather than being vaporized, much of the impactor material can survive in the crater, implying that the unusual minerals come from the impactor and may not be indigenous to the Moon.

    • Z. Yue
    • , B. C. Johnson
    •  & Y. Liu

  • Article |

    Lunar samples suggest that the inner Solar System was bombarded by asteroids about 4 Gyr ago. Radiometric ages of meteorites suggest an unusual number of high-velocity asteroids at this time, consistent with a dynamical origin of the bombardment in which the asteroids were pushed by outer planet migration onto highly eccentric orbits.

    • S. Marchi
    • , W. F. Bottke
    •  & C. T. Russell

  • News & Views |

    The presence of water in lunar volcanic rocks has been attributed to delivery after the Moon formed. Water detected in rocks from the ancient lunar highlands suggests that the Moon already contained water early in its history, and poses more challenges for the giant impact theory of Moon formation.

    • Erik H. Hauri

  • Letter |

    Water has been detected on the lunar surface and attributed to delivery by impacts and the solar wind to a dry early Moon. Spectroscopic detections of water in lunar anorthosites from the Apollo collection suggest that a significant amount of water is indigenous to the Moon.

    • Hejiu Hui
    • , Anne H. Peslier
    •  & Clive R. Neal

  • Letter |

    The nearside and farside of the Moon are compositionally distinct. The detection of low-calcium pyroxene around large impact basins suggests that the huge Procellarum basin on the nearside may be an ancient impact structure and a relic scar of the violent collision that produced the lunar dichotomy.

    • Ryosuke Nakamura
    • , Satoru Yamamoto
    •  & Kazuto Saiki

  • News & Views |

    The surface of the Moon is not totally devoid of water. Analyses of lunar soils reveal that impact glasses contain significant amounts of water, with an isotopic composition that is indicative of an origin from the solar wind.

    • Marc Chaussidon

  • News & Views |

    Enigmatically, some landslides flow farther than normal frictional resistance allows. Cassini images of Saturn's icy moon Iapetus reveal a multitude of long-runout landslides that may have been enabled by flash heating along the sliding surface.

    • Antoine Lucas

  • Article |

    The great distance travelled by long-runout landslides, observed previously on the Earth and Mars, requires a mechanism of friction reduction. Identification and analysis of long-runout landslides on Saturn’s moon Iapetus suggests that the Iapetian landslides are enabled by flash heating of the icy sliding surface.

    • Kelsi N. Singer
    • , William B. McKinnon
    •  & Jeffery M. Moore

  • Letter |

    The origin of the dichotomy between the lunar nearside and farside is unclear. Analysis of spectral reflectance data from the Kaguya lunar orbiter indicates a systematic difference in the degree of differentiation in the oldest lunar crustal terrains, linking the lunar dichotomy to crystallization of the magma ocean.

    • Makiko Ohtake
    • , Hiroshi Takeda
    •  & Paul G. Lucey

  • News & Views |

    A giant impact on the young proto-Earth is thought to explain the formation of the Moon. High-precision analysis of titanium isotopes in lunar rocks suggests that the Moon and Earth's mantle are more similar than existing models permit.

    • Matthias M. M. Meier

  • Letter |

    Geochemical evidence continues to challenge giant impact models, which predict that the Moon formed from both proto-Earth and impactor material. Analyses of lunar samples reveal isotopic homogeneity in titanium, a highly refractory element, suggesting lunar material was derived predominantly from the mantle of the proto-Earth.

    • Junjun Zhang
    • , Nicolas Dauphas
    •  & Alexei Fedkin

  • Letter |

    On the Moon, extensional tectonic features have only been observed close to the influence of the mare basalt-filled basins and floor-fractured craters. Analysis of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera images reveals several potentially very young extensional tectonic features in the farside highlands, implying that extensional stresses may locally exceed compressional ones.

    • Thomas R. Watters
    • , Mark S. Robinson
    •  & Brett W. Denevi

  • Letter |

    The absence of very deep moonquakes implies that the lower mantle of the Moon is partially molten. An analysis of the density range of lunar melts at high pressures suggests that only titanium-rich melt is neutrally buoyant deep within the Moon.

    • Mirjam van Kan Parker
    • , Chrystèle Sanloup
    •  & Wim van Westrenen

  • News & Views |

    An exotic arrow-shaped cloud was discovered in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan last year. Numerical modelling shows how a large-scale atmospheric wave can naturally shape tropical clouds to such an arrow.

    • Tetsuya Tokano

  • Letter |

    Saturn’s moon Titan exhibits an active weather cycle that involves methane. An analysis of cloud observations and simulations with a general circulation model reveals that convection in Titan’s atmosphere is organized through an interplay of two wave modes, leading to local rates of precipitation of up to twenty times the average.

    • Jonathan L. Mitchell
    • , Máté Ádámkovics
    •  & Elizabeth P. Turtle

  • News & Views |

    Observations from the Cassini–Huygens mission have produced potentially contradictory constraints on the origin of Titan's atmosphere. Experiments and a simple model demonstrate that a new mechanism for late formation is plausible.

    • Catherine Neish

  • News & Views |

    The south pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is anomalously warm, geologically youthful and cryovolcanically active. Episodic convective overturn explains how the moon's modest sources of internal heat can be channelled into intense geological activity.

    • Paul Helfenstein

  • Letter |

    Saturn’s satellite Enceladus shows higher heat loss than expected and a wide range of surface ages. Numerical simulations indicate that occasional catastrophic overturn events could be responsible for both observations by recycling portions of the icy lid to the interior, which would cause transiently enhanced heat loss.

    • Craig O’Neill
    •  & Francis Nimmo

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