82 Friends of Hoth, Episode IX: The Rise of Icy Ocean Worlds

We invite abstracts relating to surface, structural, and tectonic processes; interior, and thermal evolution; geochemistry and astrobiology; and planetary analogs as they pertain to outer planet icy satellites. This includes experimental, observational, and theoretical approaches.

Monday, 20 October 2025
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
HBGCC, 214B

Chaos Terrain Distribution by Latitude on Europa

Paper number: 82-6
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 9:20 AM – 9:35 AM

Authors

Abstract

Since the outset of the global geologic map of Europa (Leonard et al., 2024), an updated photogrammetrically corrected global image mosaic of Europa has been published (Bland et al., 2021). The purpose of the 2021 global mosaic dataset was to increase the usability of the entire Galileo image set by improving the locations of nearly every Europa image acquired by Galileo, which resulted in a more accurate depiction of Europa’s icy surface. This global mosaic now includes 481 Galileo images with pixel scale between 5.7 m/pixel and 19532.4 m/pixel. Due to shifts in the location of surface features relative to the 2002 global mosaic, the Leonard et al. (2024) geological unit boundaries, point features, and linear features on the global geologic map of Europa required updating to represent the surface morphology with higher location accuracy. Following the necessary map updates, the global geologic map of Europa was used to develop analyses of chaos terrains with respect to latitude. Chaos terrains have been a prominent area of interest for Europa enthusiasts given their hypothesized relation to endogenic geological activity on Europa (Nimmo and Giese, 2005). As such, we used the global geologic map to test the hypothesis that chaos terrains have a latitudinal pattern in formation dictated by ice shell thickness and tidal heating patterns (e.g., Tobie et al., 2003). Previous observations have suggested widespread chaos across diverse latitudes, including the poles (e.g., Collins and Nimmo, 2009). Our results show that chaos terrain area tends to be symmetrically distributed around the equator. The north pole remains as a notable exception to this, as it was found to have ≈ 22-34% more chaos area per latitude range than the south pole, which may indicate comparatively thin ice shell thickness. Three data iterations were developed to mitigate potential map biases and address the influence of data voids near the poles.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-413513

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