#cryovolcano

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“Water, in its many forms, continues to amaze me. From warm gentle streams in summer to the surprising frozen cryovolcanoes of the shelf-ice of the Great Lakes, water is ever changing” – Ed Lehming Today, I went for a walk along the shores of Lake Ontario. My destination, once more, was Lakeshore Beach in Sandbanks Provincial Park, which I have written about quite a bit lately. Just a few weeks…

The comet 29P recently had a BIG Cryovolcanic eruption - so, cold volcanos... moving around... in space.... that's all I needed to say.

The ion-powered Dawn spacecraft orbited the dwarf planet Ceres, taking false-color images that highlight differences in surface materials. It appears that Ceres once had a global liquid ocean whose surface is now frozen and bound up with rocks, salts and clathrate hydrates(a cage of water molecules surrounding a gas molecule). Yet, liquid water may still exist deep below the icy crust.

In fact, Dawn sent back images of a huge cryovolcano (a volcano that erupts liquid water instead of lava) named Ahuna Mons; it towers 3 miles(5km) above the surface.

Ceres has a diameter of about 590 miles (950km), making it the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, comprising 25% of the belt's total mass.

"NUMEROUS ICE VOLCANOES MAY HAVE EXISTED ON CERES ONCE UPON A TIME"

 According to new research by Michael Sori and colleagues at the Lunar Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, Ahuna Mons, Ceres' only ice volcano, may have once had company. These older cryovolcanoes would have flattened out and disappeared over the eons via a process called 'viscous relaxation'.  Viscous relaxation is a process in which many solids on a planetary surface flow, given enough time (think of flowing glaciers found on Earth). Unlike Earth's rocky mountains, Ahuna Mons has a lot of water ice mixed in, making it a relaxation candidate.  Through computer simulation models of Ahuna Mons, Sori and his colleagues found that such relaxation would only occur if the cryovolcanoes were made of at least 40 percent water ice. Estimating a rate of flattening of about 10 to 50 metres (33 feets to 165 feet) per 1 million years , Ceres' cryovolcanoes could have been wiped out in hundreds of millions to a few billion years. Therefore it is entirely possible that Ahuna Mons once had older brothers and sisters, which have since vanished back into Ceres' frigid surface.  "It would be fun to check some of the other features that are potentially older domes on Ceres to see if they fit in with the theory of how the shapes should viscously evolve over time," Singer said in the same statement. "Because all of the putative cryovolcanic features on other worlds are different, I think this helps to expand our inventory of what is possible."