Scientists claim that Saturn’s largest moon Titan’s lakes were formed by waves

The enormous lakes and oceans filled with liquid methane on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan may have been formed by wave forces.

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the second largest in the solar system after Jupiter’s Ganymede. It is also the only body in the solar system other than Earth that has lakes, seas, and rivers filled with methane and ethane rather than water.

According to a new paper published in the journal Scientific advancesThese strange bodies of water, some of which are roughly the size of the Great Lakes, may have been formed by waves.

“We find that when the shoreline is eroding, its shape is more consistent with wave-driven erosion than when there is uniform erosion or no erosion,” Taylor Perron, co-author of the study and professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at MIT, said in a statement.

Titan has a diameter of about 3,200 miles, making it larger than Mercury. Its thick atmosphere is about 1.5 times denser than Earth’s and is made up mainly of nitrogen with small amounts of methane and hydrogen.

These giant lakes were confirmed to exist after NASA’s Cassini spacecraft flew past the moon in 2007, and their method of formation and shape have puzzled scientists ever since.

Now, in a new paper, MIT scientists explain how they simulated the moon’s ocean and concluded that wave action is the most likely explanation for its shape.

However, this is somewhat debatable.

“Some people who looked for evidence of waves didn’t see any waves at all and said, ‘The ocean is as smooth as a mirror,'” Palermo said. “Others said they saw some roughness on the water but weren’t sure if it was from waves.”

Titan’s oceans are thought to have originally formed after freezing cold liquid methane and ethane covered the landscape, and while the current shape of the coastlines may not have changed since then, they could have been eroded into their current shape in a variety of ways.

The researchers modeled how lakes erode on Earth, including through wave action and “homogeneous erosion,” in which shorelines passively dissolve and peel away, and applied the methods to Titan’s lakes.

“We found that starting from the same coastline, uniform erosion and wave erosion end up with very different shapes,” Perron said. “It looks like a flying spaghetti monster because of the flooded river valley, but the two types of erosion end up with very different shapes.”

They found that the wave erosion scenario most closely matches the observed shape of Titan’s coastline, meaning that waves are the likely culprit behind the shape of Titan’s lakes.

“Our findings suggest that if Titan’s coastline is eroding, it’s likely due to waves,” Perron said. “If you could stand on the edge of Titan’s ocean, you’d see waves of liquid methane and ethane washing up on the shore during storms and crashing against the shore. And those waves could erode the material that makes up the shore.”

The researchers point out that this conclusion is not 100% confirmed and will not be confirmed until they directly observe the wave activity on Titan’s surface.

The discovery could help astronomers learn more about conditions on Titan: knowing how waves carve the shoreline could help predict the speed, strength, and direction of the moon’s winds.

It could also allow for more accurate predictions of how Titan’s oceans will change shape in the future.

“Titan provides an example of a completely pristine system,” Palermo says, “that can help us learn more fundamental things about how coasts erode without human influence, which may allow us to better manage coastlines on Earth in the future.”

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