期刊
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS
卷 47, 期 13, 页码 -出版社
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2020GL087481
关键词
Titan; clathrates; thermal evolution; ocean
资金
- Czech Science Foundation [19-10809S]
- Charles University Research Program [UNCE/SCI/023]
- Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports from the Large Infrastructures for Research, Experimental Development and Innovations project IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center [LM2015070]
- NASA Astrobiology Institute through project Habitability of Hydrocarbon Worlds: Titan and Beyond [17-NAI8_2-0017]
Saturn's largest moon Titan is unique for its dense, methane-rich atmosphere, with ongoing complex organics chemistry, and the hydrocarbon lakes and seas on its frigid surface. Titan also harbors a subsurface water ocean, and its ice shell is likely capped by a thick crust of low-conductivity methane clathrates that are very stable under Titan's surface conditions. Here, we investigate the effect of this insulating clathrate crust on convection in the ice shell. Without the clathrate crust, convection occurs below a stagnant lid that is a few tens of kilometers thick and limits the exchange between the surface and the deep ocean. We show that a 5-10 km thick clathrate crust reduces the stagnant lid thickness about threefold thus increasing the potential for the ocean-surface exchange. Moreover, the insulating effect of clathrates dramatically decreases the amount of extracted heat thus limiting the freezing rate of Titan's ocean.
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