Europa’ swateryunderworld Europa, one of Jupiter’s 63 known moons,looks bright and icy on

Europa’ swateryunderworld

Europa, one of Jupiter’s 63 known moons,looks bright and icy on the surface. But appearances can be deceiving: Mileswithin its cracked, frigid shell, Europa probably hides giant pools of liquidwater. Where scientists find liquid water, they hope to find life as well.

Since we can’t go diving into Europa’sdepths just yet, scientists instead have to investigate the moon’s surface forclues to what lies beneath. In a new study, scientists investigated one group of strange ice patterns on Europa and concluded that the formations mark the top of an underground pool that holds as much water as the U.S. Great Lakes.

Pictures of Europa, which is slightlysmaller than Earth’s moon, clearly show a tangled, icy mishmash of lines andcracks known as “chaos terrains.” These chaotic places cover more than half ofEuropa. For more than 10 years, scientists have wondered what causes theformations. The new study suggests that they arise from the mixing of vastunderground stores of liquid water with icy material near the surface.

For scientists who suspect that Europaalso may be hiding life beneath its icy surface, the news about the new lake isexciting.

“It would be great if these lakesharbored life,” Britney Schmidt, a planetary scientist who worked on the study,told Science News. “But even if they didn’t, they say that Europa is doingsomething interesting and active right now.”

Schmidt,a scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, and her colleagueswanted to know how chaos terrains form. Since they couldn’t rocket to Europa tosee for themselves, they searched for similar formations here on Earth. Theystudied collapsed ice shelves in Antarctica and icy caps on volcanoes in Iceland. Thosefeatures on Earth formed when liquid water mixed with ice. The scientists nowsuspect something similar might be happening on Europa: that as water and iceof different temperatures mingle and shift, the surface fractures. This wouldexplain the jumbled ice sculptures.“Fracturing catastrophically disruptsthe ice in the same way that it causes ice shelves to collapse on Earth,”Schmidt told Science News. She and her team found that the process could becausing chaos terrains to form. quickly on Europa.

The new study suggests that on thismoon, elements such as oxygen from the surface blend with the deep bodies ofwater. That mixture may create an environment that

supports life.

The liquid water of an underground pool of Europa is estimated xxxxx of the US Greatlakes.

A. Right

B. Wrong

C. Not mention