The Salty Secrets of Icy Ocean Worlds

Abstract

As new insights have emerged in recent decades about the dynamics of sea ice, researchers have sought to extend these insights to ice covered oceans in the solar system, where nonicy materials preserved in icy lithospheres may hold clues to solid-state convection and the possible presence of life. The recent study by Buffo et al. (2020), https://doi.org/10.1029/2020je006394, considers the salt content of the ice covering Jupiter's moon Europa in the context of gravity drainage and mushy layer theory, and makes provocative predictions about the amounts of salts retained in the ice. A major question in such studies is how well the preservation and transport of salts in ice translates to the length and time scales of ices in ocean worlds. This work underlines the fundamental importance of including the role of chemistry in the modeling the structures and dynamics of the ice layers in ocean worlds.