Home > News and Articles > 62 Miles Beneath the Sea! Deepest Ocean in the Solar System Discovered on Jupiter’s Europa

62 Miles Beneath the Sea! Deepest Ocean in the Solar System Discovered on Jupiter’s Europa

October 28th, 2010

6a00d8341bf7f753ef0115707fed48970b-800wi The deepest ocean on Earth is the Pacific Ocean's Marianas Trench, which reaches a depth of 6.8 miles awesomely trumped by the depth of the ocean on the Jupiter's moon, Europa, which some measurements put at 62 miles. That's deep!

Although Europa is covered in a thick crust of scarred and cross-hatched ice, measurements made by NASA's Galileo spacecraft and other probes strongly suggest that a liquid ocean lies beneath that surface. The interior is warmed, researchers believe, by the tidal stresses exerted on Europa by Jupiter and several other large moons, as well as by radioactivity. 

Most scientists believe that the subEuropan seas are locked under tens of kilometers of ice.  Heat is then conducted from the warm core by bulk convective motion of ice - huge chunks of frozen material literally carrying the heat away with them as they move up through the icy layer, shuffling and refreezing as they dump heat into space.


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