According to new analysis, the vast liquid ethane and methane bodies that cover the surface of Titan could be populated by waves that carve the shoreline.
These waves could be carving out lake and river shapes that are idiosyncratic to the hazy and exotic moon.
Wave Carvings in Titan
The discovery sheds great light to Titan and to how liquid bodies could behave in worlds that are extremely different from the Earth.
Taylor Perron, a geologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said that based on the results, they can say that if the coastlines of the seas of Titan have eroded, it is likely that waves are the culprit.
If they could stand at the edge of one of Titan's seas, seeing liquid ethane and methane waves that lap on the shore and crash over the coasts in the midst of storms could be possible. They may also erode material that makes up the coast.
Aside from the Earth, Titan is the only known body within the Solar System that contains liquid reservoirs over the surface.
Rose Palermo, a geologist from the US Geological Survey, said that some people who try seeing wave evidence were not able to see any. However, others were able to observe some roughness over the surface of roughness but were unsure if these were due to waves.
In order to learn more, Palermo, Perron, and their team carried out in-depth modeling to try to replicate waterway and lake shapes observed in Titan images.
For one, they examined Earth and conducted modeling to see how various coastal erosion mechanisms could affect the shorelines of water bodies. This offered a basic framework for making use of shoreline morphology for discerning various processes of erosion that could underlie a liquid body.
They then applied such a framework to the moon, examining three different scenarios. In one case, coastal erosion was not present. The second covered wave-driven erosion, while the third covered a uniform process of erosion.
One thing that is particularly important is a property called fetch, which is the distance in which wind may move unimpeded over a liquid body and transfer energy to the liquid surface as it moves forward. Longer wind distances could lead to greater energy transfer and wilder surface growth.
Palermo explained that the erosion of waves is driven by the wave's angle and height. They made use of fetch for approximating wave height.
In the simulations, the three situations resulted in shorelines that were extremely different. The ones that were most similar to the actual shorelines in Titan were those in which the waves lapped or crashed over the shores. Those with uniform erosion seemingly resembled the erosion of Earth's lakes.
This was noted in the "Signatures of wave erosion in Titan's coasts" study.
However, this is not concrete evidence. In fact, whether Titan does or does not have waves remains unknown unless a closer look is taken.
This is what the mission of Dragonfly aims to do. This craft is set to reach Titan by 2034.
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Titan
The discovery of the moon traces back to 1655. The surface of Titan has remained hidden due to an atmosphere that is hazy and thick that covers it. Gerard Kuiper formally discovered that this was methane when he found methane in the spectrum in 1944.
It was only during the early 2000s, when the Cassini probe was launched into Saturn's orbit, that the Kronian lunar surface was described in detail.
Ever since, scientists have been curious about what the ethane and methane bodies could be like.
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