{"id":783017,"date":"2026-07-25T03:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T03:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/783017\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T03:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T03:20:08","slug":"europas-hidden-ocean-may-be-even-harder-to-reach-than-we-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/783017\/","title":{"rendered":"Europa’s Hidden Ocean May Be Even Harder to Reach Than We Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, researchers warned against the dangers of \u201cfluffy ice\u201d<\/a> on Europa\u2019s surface. If unaccounted for, missions headed to Jupiter\u2019s moon could drown themselves in its deep, icy oceans. A new study suggests that this won\u2019t happen\u2014but for reasons that won\u2019t make our Europa trips any easier.<\/p>\n

A paper<\/a> published yesterday in Nature Astronomy challenges the assumption that the shallow pools of water on Europa\u2019s surface represent a direct access route to the moon\u2019s deep, icy oceans. In theory, this supposed access route could make it easier for a probe to explore how liquid water from Europa\u2019s deep oceans traveled through cracks in the ice to the surface. Unfortunately, we\u2019re not sure if this even happens.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is exactly what we wanted to test,\u201d Lujendra Ojha<\/a>, the study\u2019s first author and an earth scientist at Rutgers University, told Gizmodo. \u201cIn particular, we asked whether the water could travel this distance before losing enough heat to freeze and whether the fractures could remain open long enough to transport a meaningful amount of water.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prospects real icy <\/p>\n

For the study, Ojha and colleagues simulated the movement and cooling of water inside the fractures of Europa\u2019s icy shell. In a Rutgers statement<\/a>, Ojha explained that earlier models \u201coften treated water rising through Europa\u2019s ice as if it moved in a relatively orderly way.\u201d They also draw an analogy between volcanoes and icy volcanoes, although there are \u201cfundamental\u201d differences between ice, liquid water, lava, and volcanoes, he added.<\/p>\n

The latest approach, on the other hand, takes a more realistic approach by accommodating for numerous factors, such as water velocity, the size of the crack, turbulence, and supercooling. The simulations arrived at a simple\u2014perhaps discouraging\u2014conclusion. All things considered, there are too many obstacles for deep ocean water to reliably arrive at the surface. For instance, if the water rises turbulently, it would \u201close heat rapidly to the surrounding ice and form small ice crystals that could eventually clog the fracture,\u201d Ojha told Gizmodo.<\/p>\n

For the Europa fans <\/p>\n

So the small pools of water we\u2019ve observed at the surface probably come from melted sections of the icy crust, rather than from deep down below. Having said that, Ojha told Gizmodo that the findings don\u2019t necessarily warrant drastic shifts in our missions to Europa. But if spacecraft detect shallow liquid-water reservoirs on Europa, we\u2019d be smart not to \u201cautomatically assume that the water came from Europa\u2019s deep ocean,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn that case, the chemical, physical, maybe biological constraints we are able to derive from studying the shallow liquid water layer may not at all reflect the chemistry of the underlying ocean,\u201d Ojha concluded. \u201cFuture missions should, therefore, focus not only on finding shallow water but also on determining its origin and whether it is connected to the deeper ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this year, researchers warned against the dangers of \u201cfluffy ice\u201d on Europa\u2019s surface. If unaccounted for, missions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[41496,16492,79],"class_list":["post-783017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-europa","tag-planetary-science","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}