Klára Kalousová

Ice melting and downward transport of meltwater by two-phase flow in Europa's ice shell

With its young surface, very few impact craters, and the abundance of tectonic and cryovolcanic features, Europa has likely been subjected to relatively recent endogenic activity. Morphological analyses of chaos terrains and double ridges suggest the presence of liquid water within the ice shell a few kilometers below the surface, which may result from enhanced tidal heating. A major issue concerns the thermal/gravitational stability of these water reservoirs. Here we investigate the conditions under which water can be generated and transported through Europas ice shell. We address particularly the downward two-phase flow by solving the equations for a two-phase mixture of water ice and liquid water in one-dimensional geometry. In the case of purely temperate ice, we show that water is transported downward very efficiently in the form of successive porosity waves. The time needed to transport the water from the subsurface region to the underlying ocean varies between ∼1 and 100 kyr, depending mostly on the ice permeability. We further show that water produced in the head of tidally heated hot plumes never accumulates at shallow depths and is rapidly extracted from the ice shell (within less than a few hundred kiloyears). Our calculations indicate that liquid water will be largely absent in the near subsurface, with the possible exception of cold conductive regions subjected to strong tidal friction. Recently active double ridges subjected to large tidally driven strike-slip motions are perhaps the most likely candidates for the detection of transient water lenses at shallow depths on Europa.

Water generation and transport below Europa's strike-slip faults

Jupiters moon Europa has a very young surface with the abundance of unique terrains that indicate recent endogenic activity. Morphological models as well as spectral observations suggest that it might possess shallow lenses of liquid water within its outer ice shell. Here we investigate the generation and possible accumulation of liquid water below the tidally activated strike-slip faults using a numerical model of two-phase ice-water mixture in two-dimensional Cartesian geometry. Our results suggest that generation of shallow partially molten regions underneath Europas active strike-slip faults is possible, but their lifetime is constrained by the formation of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities due to the negative buoyancy of the melt. Once formed, typically within a few million years, these instabilities efficiently transport the meltwater through the shell. Consequently, the maximum water content in the partially molten regions never exceeds 10% which challenges their possible detection by future exploration mission.

Water transport in planetary ice shells by two-phase flow – a parametric study

We present a two-phase model for the generation of meltwater and its propagation through the outer shells of icy satellites such as Europa, Enceladus or Titan. We exploit the analogy with the process of partial melt generation in the Earth’s interior by adopting the formalism of two-phase flow developed in the mantle-dynamics community, and by means of scaling analysis we derive a reduced system appropriate for our planetary application. The resultant system couples Darcy’s law with the deformation of the viscous ice matrix. We numerically investigate the system in a simplified one-dimensional geometry, corresponding to a laterally uniform ice layer, and analyze the role of various physical parameters. We focus on the leading-order effects, namely (i) the key importance of ice permeability, (ii) the role of complex ice rheology depending on temperature, deformation mechanisms and water content, (iii) the possible contribution of surface tension and (iv) the effects of mechanical coupling between the phases. Our analysis suggests that the global water transport through temperate ice is mainly controlled by ice permeability and can be well approximated by a model in which the complex ice rheology is parameterized in terms of a constant viscosity. While the mechanical coupling between the phases dramatically affects the flow at the local scale, the surface tension appears to be insignificant.