Topic: Europa's Oceans Full Of Oxygen

[Dracho]

Europa's Ocean Has Oxygen, May Support Life
Friday, October 09, 2009

Space.com

Jupiter's moon Europa is flowing with a buried liquid water ocean that contains much more oxygen than previously thought — enough to possibly support life, scientists say.

There is no solid evidence of life for anywhere besides Earth, but Europa has long been considered a good place to look for biological activity.

Europa's ocean lies beneath several miles of ice, so scientists wondered whether it has much oxygen, which is thought to be created at the surface by interaction with energetic charged particles from the sun. Scientists think oxygen is probably necessary for life's metabolic processes, unless some creatures use exotic chemistry involving sulfur or methane.

The global ocean on Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all the Earth's oceans combined. The new research suggests that there may be a hundred times more oxygen than previously estimated.

To probe how much oxygen might lie in the ocean, Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona studied Europa's surface, which appears to be only about 50 million years old — roughly 1 percent of the age of the solar system — and continually reforming.

He considered three possible resurfacing processes: gradually laying fresh material on the surface, opening cracks which fill with fresh ice from below, and disrupting patches of surface in place and replacing them with fresh material. Using estimates for the production of oxygen at the surface, Greenberg found that the delivery rate into the ocean is likely so fast that the oxygen concentration could exceed that of the Earth's oceans in only a few million years.

These concentrations of oxygen could be great enough to support not only microorganisms, but also larger animals that have greater oxygen demands, Greenberg said.

The good news for the question of the origin of life is that there would be a delay of a couple of billion years before the first surface oxygen reached the ocean. Without that delay, the first pre-biotic chemistry and the first primitive organic structures would be disrupted by oxidation, or rusting. Oxidation is a hazard unless organisms have evolved protection from its damaging effects. A similar delay in the production of oxygen on Earth was probably essential for allowing life to get started here.

Greenberg will present his findings Friday at the 41st meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.

[marstone]

Nice Theory.  Will be nice if they ever get the probe there that they plan on dilling into the ocean to see what it is composed of.  Much better then the guesses being made now.

Reminds me of the fact turned fiction about Jupiter.  They believed that Jupiter had many layers of different densities of gasses.  The differnt layers flowing would have caused the swirling on the surface.  But when a probe went down through the gasss found it was a the same mixtures of gasses until the probe was destroyed.

But again, will be interesting to watch the developments on this.

[Dash Jones]

Then it depends on how one feels life formed on Earth and how that relates to the other planet.  If they feel it developed from nothing, or animate matter from inanimate matter...then there's no problem.

However if one subscribes to the terrestrial theory where bacteria came from space, crashed on the planet and evolved, then it becomes problematic due to figuring how a bacteria could live for billions of years as the ice changed over with the water and then after all that time, the bacteria is still alive enough and has enough of it to evolve.

[marstone]

Then it depends on how one feels life formed on Earth and how that relates to the other planet.  If they feel it developed from nothing, or animate matter from inanimate matter...then there's no problem.

However if one subscribes to the terrestrial theory where bacteria came from space, crashed on the planet and evolved, then it becomes problematic due to figuring how a bacteria could live for billions of years as the ice changed over with the water and then after all that time, the bacteria is still alive enough and has enough of it to evolve.

Not really, because if you think life started from bacteria from space taking root on earth, you still have to ask.  Where did that bacteria come from?  How did it start, had to originally form from smaller components, so why not in the oceans of europa.

[Bonk]

"My God, It's full of stars!" 

[Corbomite]

The hell you say?!

[FPF-Tobin Dax]

What? What's going to happen?

Something wonderful.

All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there.