Are there underground oceans

Melissa Davey. Fri 13 Jun Topics Geology Chemistry Space news. Reuse this content. Saturn's powerful gravity stretches and deforms Titan as the moon moves around the gas giant planet. If Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn should cause bulges, or solid "tides," on the moon only 3 feet 1 meter in height.

Instead, the data show Saturn creates solid tides approximately 30 feet 10 meters in height. This suggests Titan is not made entirely of solid rocky material. At first, scientists were not sure Cassini would be able to detect the bulges caused by Saturn's pull on Titan. Cassini succeeded, however, by measuring Titan's gravitational field during six close flybys from Feb. But, short of being able to drill on Titan's surface, the gravity measurements provide the best data we have of Titan's internal structure.

An ocean layer does not have to be huge or deep to create the observed tides. A liquid layer between the external, deformable shell and a solid mantle would enable Titan to bulge and compress as it orbits Saturn. Because Titan's surface is mostly made of water ice, which is abundant in moons of the outer solar system, scientists believe Titan's ocean is likely mostly liquid water. On Earth, tides result from the gravitational attraction of the moon and sun pulling on our surface oceans.

In the open oceans, those can be as high as two feet 60 centimeters. Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades. To laymen, the Earth has three layers: crust, mantle, and core. It is a bit more complex than that, as the mantle itself has four distinct layers : lithosphere, athenosphere, upper mantle, and lower mantle. Even among those layers, different areas have different features.

Many scientists have assumed that the transition zone between the upper and lower mantle miles beneath the surface contained water, though this experiment is the first to provide the necessary direct evidence to support that theory. For this study, the researchers utilized the USArray, which collects information from over 2, seismometers in the United States. The observations were supported by computer models that replicated conditions from the transition zone. The key to storing the water, they found, is a mineral called ringwoodite, which is a form of olivine that exists under high pressure and temperature.

This mineral can contain a lot of water under conditions of the deep mantle.