Tidal Dissipation in Europa’s Ice Shell with a Heterogeneous Temperature Distribution
نویسنده
چکیده
Introduction: Heterogeneous tidal dissipation in Europa’s ice shell has been suggested as a mechanism to generate tectonic features on the surface [1-3]. Several authors have proposed that Europa’s pits, uplifts, and chaos terrains resulted from surface deformation by convection within the ice shell [1,4-5]. If tidal heating were temperature dependent, as predicted for a homogeneous material with Maxwell viscoelastic rheology [6], then warm, ascending convective plumes might experience greater tidal heating than the cooler background ice, promoting a thermal runaway that induces localized heating, partial melting, and surface disruption [2-3]. Mitri & Showman [7] showed with simple analytical models that, even when a warm convective plume is surrounded on all sides by colder, stiffer ice, the tidal heating in the warm plume is strongly temperature dependent if the material obeys Maxwell rheology. To date, however, convection models that investigate temperature-dependent tidal heating all adopt a heating dependence on the local temperature corresponding the predictions of the homogeneous Maxwell model rather than selfconsistently calculating the heating for the heterogeneous shell under consideration [2,8-10].
منابع مشابه
Coupled convection and tidal dissipation in Europa’s ice shell
0019-1035/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2009.12.028 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (L. Han), showman man). We performed 2D numerical simulations of oscillatory tidal flexing to study the interrelationship between tidal dissipation (calculated using the Maxwell model) and a heterogeneous temperature structure in Europa’s ice shell. Our 2D sim...
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