<Bands on Europa

--- Rifting at Earth's mid-ocean ridges is a good analogy for Europan band formation.

Written by Linda M.V. Martel
Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology
posted November 25, 2002

High-resolution Galileo images of Jupiter's icy moon Europa show linear, curved, and wedge-shaped bands crisscrossing the surface. The bands are one of five primary terrain types previously mapped on Europa; the other types are plains, chaos, ridge, and crater materials [see PSRD article: The Europa Scene in the Voyager-Galileo Era.] Now a team of scientists from the Applied Physics Lab (APL), Brown University, Cornell University, the Nordic Volcanological Institute (Iceland), and the Institute of Planetary Exploration (Germany) have made detailed maps of five distinct bands. Louise Prockter (APL) and her colleagues compare the Europan bands to Earth's mid-ocean ridges. They discuss fast-spreading and slow-spreading models for the Europan bands showing how warm ice may have welled up to the surface through fractures. The team concludes that mid-ocean ridge rifting is a good analogy for Europan band formation, that bands were responsible for hemisphere-wide resurfacing on Europa, and that the style of resurfacing has changed over time.

Reference:
Prockter, L. M., J. W. Head III, R. T. Pappalardo, R. J. Sullivan, A. E. Clifton, B. Giese, R. Wagner, and G. Neukum (2002) Morphology of Europan bands at high resolution: A mid-ocean ridge-type rift mechanism, Journal of Geophysical Research, 107(E5), 10.1029/2000JE001458.

Alex R. Blackwell
University of Hawaii