Waves of methane hit the shores of Saturn’s strange moon Titan

In 2006, a NASA spacecraft flew by Saturn’s largest moon and found evidence of large masses of liquid on the surface of this strange world. . The shocking discovery meant that Titan’s landscape was very similar to Earth’s; It is known that these two worlds are the only ones on the surface of which there are rivers, lakes and seas.

However, Titan’s coastline is not as attractive as ours. Instead of water, the liquid flowing through Titan is an unholy mixture of methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons. If that doesn’t sound dramatic enough, a new study suggests that waves of greenhouse gases could crash into the moon’s shores, shaping its wet landscape.

A team of geologists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tried to solve the mystery of Titan’s coastline and find out whether waves eroded the Moon’s coastline to its current shape. Using computer models, the researchers simulated the different types of erosion that could occur along the coastlines shown in the figure. Images taken by the Cassini mission almost 20 years ago.

“If we could stand on the edge of one of Titan’s seas, we could see waves of liquid methane and ethane crashing on the coast and crashing ashore during storms. And they will be able to destroy the material from which the coast is made,” Taylor Perron, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the study, said in an emailed statement. recommendations published in the magazine Scientific achievements.

Scientists have debated the presence of waves on Titan for years, with some claiming that liquid bodies on the Moon are mirror-smooth, while others see jagged coastlines. Instead of studying images to figure out whether Titan has waves or not, the researchers behind the new study studied the shape of the coastline to try to figure out what might have caused it to erode.

The researchers modeled a sea with flooded river valleys along the edges and considered three scenarios: no coastal erosion, wave erosion, and uniform erosion, in which fluid over time passively dissolves material from the shoreline as it moves. weight.

“We had the same initial shorelines, and we saw that the final shape was completely different with uniform erosion compared to wave erosion.” – said Perron. “They all look like flying spaghetti monsters because of the flooded river valleys, but both types of erosion lead to very different end effects.”

The team mapped the coastlines of each of Titan’s seas using Cassini radar images and applied their modeling to each of the sea’s coastlines. All four seas were found to fit the wave erosion model as the most likely mechanism to explain their shape. “Based on our results, if the coasts of Titan’s seas have been eroded, the most likely culprits are waves,” Perron said.

Researchers are now preparing to observe Titan’s winds and figure out how strong they would have to be to produce waves strong enough to destroy them. on the shore of the Moon.

“Titan represents an example of a completely intact system,” Rose Palermo, a former MIT graduate student and USGS research geologist and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “This could help us learn more fundamental things about how coastlines erode without human influence, and perhaps it will help us better manage our coastlines on Earth in the future.”

Further: New images show Saturn’s moon Titan in incredible detail.