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Exploring ocean worlds on Earth and beyond

Nature Geoscience volume 11, pages 2–4 (2018)Cite this article

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The exploration of ocean worlds in the outer Solar System offers the opportunity to search for an independent origin of life, and also to advance our capabilities for exploring and understanding life in Earth’s oceans.

Earth — the blue planet — is not our Solar System’s only ocean world. Over the past half-century, multiple planetary bodies that harbour large volumes of liquid water beneath ice-covered surfaces have been identified in the outer Solar System. These include three of Jupiter’s four largest satellites — Europa, Ganymede and Callisto — and the Saturnian satellites Enceladus and Titan. Although yet to be confirmed, numerous other ocean worlds may populate the outer solar system, including Neptune’s moon Triton, and possibly Uranus’ moons Titania and Oberon. Together, all of these bodies are predicted to host more than twenty times the volume of liquid water found in Earth’s oceans1, and are prime targets in our search for evidence for an independent origin of life beyond Earth2. Whether or not these potentially habitable worlds are actually inhabited can only be determined through a bold robotic program to directly investigate the surfaces of these ocean worlds and the interiors of their oceans. The exploration of these distant oceans will be challenging and expensive, but it is technologically feasible to commence within the next few decades. Here, we argue that this investment should be leveraged to advance our understanding of Earth’s oceans, too.

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Fig. 1: The Old Man Tree vent on the Mid-Cayman Rise, part of the ultramafic-influenced Von Damm seafloor hydrothermal field9.

NOAA Ocean Exploration program.

Fig. 2: A vision for future exploration of ocean worlds.

K.P. Hand, NASA/JPL, Stone Aerospace and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

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Acknowledgements

KPH acknowledges support from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the NASA. CRG acknowledges support from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Both KPH and CRG also acknowledge support from NASA PSTAR grant NNX16AL04G.

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  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Kevin Peter Hand

  2. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA

    Christopher R. German

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  1. Kevin Peter Hand
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  2. Christopher R. German
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Correspondence to Kevin Peter Hand or Christopher R. German.

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Hand, K.P., German, C.R. Exploring ocean worlds on Earth and beyond. Nature Geosci 11, 2–4 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-017-0045-9

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