Home to a sub-surface ocean, Saturn‘s moon Enceladus is a fascinating candidate for life in our solar system. As it orbits Saturn, plumes periodically shoot out long surface features known as tiger stripes that sit near the icy moon’s southern pole. A recent study, based on numerical simulation, suggests a geophysical mechanism that could account for the plumes.
The team suggests that, like the San Andreas Fault, the tiger stripes are a fault subject to strike-slip motion. In this type of fault, the ice on either side meets along a vertical face and the two sides will slide past one another in opposite directions. As Enceladus orbits, its proximity to Saturn causes tidal compression across the fault that modulates how much slip motion occurs. In their model, the authors found that strike-slip motion would intermittently open gaps in the fault that would allow water from the subsurface ocean to create plumes at intervals consistent with those observed. (Image credit: top – NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, illustration – A. Berne et al.; research credit: A. Berne et al.; via Gizmodo)
