Researchers discover that wave activity on Saturn’s largest moon may be strong enough to erode the coastlines of lakes and seas.
Waves As Erosive Forces on Titan
The MIT team took a different approach to investigate the presence of waves on Titan, by first modeling the ways in which a lake can erode on Earth. They then applied their modeling to Titan’s seas to determine what form of erosion could have produced the shorelines in Cassini’s images. Waves, they found, were the most likely explanation.
The researchers emphasize that their results are not definitive; to confirm that there are waves on Titan will require direct observations of wave activity on the moon’s surface.
“We can say, based on our results, that if the coastlines of Titan’s seas have eroded, waves are the most likely culprit,” says Taylor Perron, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “If we could stand at the edge of one of Titan’s seas, we might see waves of liquid methane and ethane lapping on the shore and crashing on the coasts during storms. And they would be capable of eroding the material that the coast is made of.”
Perron and his colleagues, including first author Rose Palermo, a former MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student and a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, will publish their study in a forthcoming issue of DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn4192
This work was supported in part by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the USGS, and the Heising-Simons Foundation.