In 2006, a NASA spacecraft flew near Saturn’s largest moon and found evidence of large masses of liquid on the surface of this strange world. . The shocking discovery meant that Titan’s landscape is eerily similar to that of Earth; The two worlds are the only ones known to have rivers, lakes and seas on the surface.
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Titan’s coast, however, is not as attractive as ours. Instead of water, the fluid running through Titan is an unholy mix of methane, ethane, and other hydrocarbons. If this doesn’t sound harsh enough, a new study suggests that waves of greenhouse gases could crash into the moon’s shores, shaping its humid landscape.
A team of geologists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sought to solve the mystery of Titan’s coastline and whether waves eroded the moon’s shorelines into its current form. Using computer models, the researchers simulated the different types of erosion that could have occurred on the coastlines shown in images captured by the Cassini mission almost 20 years ago.
“If we could stand at the edge of one of Titan’s seas, we could see waves of liquid methane and ethane breaking on the coast and crashing onto the shores during storms. And they would be able to erode the material that the coast is made of,” Taylor Perron, an MIT professor and co-author of the study, in an emailed statement. recommendations are published in the magazine Scientific advances.
Scientists have debated the presence of waves on Titan for years, with some arguing that liquid bodies on the Moon are mirror-smooth, while others saw rugged coastlines. Instead of looking at the images to investigate whether Titan hosts waves or not, the researchers behind the new study looked at the shape of the coastline to try and figure out what may have resulted in its erosion.
The researchers simulated a sea with flooded river valleys around its edges and ran it through three scenarios: no coastal erosion, wave-driven erosion, and uniform erosion whereby liquid passively dissolves material from a coastline over time as it moves. gradually detaches under its own weight.
“We had the same initial shorelines and we saw that you get a really different final shape under uniform erosion versus wave erosion.” Perron said. “They all look like flying spaghetti monsters because of flooded river valleys, but the two types of erosion produce very different endpoints.”
The team mapped the coastlines of each of Titan’s seas using radar images from Cassini and applied their modeling to each of the sea’s coastlines. All four seas were found to fit the wave erosion model as the most likely mechanism to explain their shape. “Based on our results, if the coasts of Titan’s seas have eroded, waves are the most likely culprit,” Perron said.
Researchers are now preparing to observe Titan’s winds and examine how strong they must be to cause waves strong enough to break them up. on the shores of the moon.
“Titan presents this case for a completely intact system,” Rose Palermo, a former MIT graduate student and research geologist at the US Geological Survey, and lead author of the study, said in the statement. “It could help us learn more fundamental things about how coastlines erode without the influence of people, and maybe that can help us better manage our coastlines on Earth in the future.”
Further: New images show Saturn’s Moon Titan in incredible detail
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