Icy moon oceans

Icy moons in our Solar System, including Europa and Enceladus, are important targets in the search for extraterrestrial life because their subsurface oceans may be habitable. Material released at the rocky seafloor may contain evidence of habitable conditions or possible signs of life. Interpreting material that reaches the ice shell requires understanding how it travels through the ocean.

I use NASA’s ROCKE-3D model and high-resolution Oceananigans.jl simulations to study circulation in rapidly rotating oceans heated from below. The high-resolution simulations resolve turbulent structures and their interaction with large-scale currents and overturning circulations.

A current focus is the role of tropical convective rolls: turbulent structures that can connect east-west jets with large-scale overturning and exchange between latitudes. Ongoing work examines how these structures influence the pathways that carry heat and seafloor-derived material toward the ice shell.

This work addresses a general problem in planetary oceanography: how rotation, heating, and ocean geometry organize circulation in oceans very different from Earth’s. A paper describing this work and further results will be available here soon.