Scientists find humongous methane lake on Saturn's moon (+video)

The otherwise dry tropics of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, hold a massive lake of methane that is thought to be fed by underground channels.?

By Charles Q. Choi,?SPACE.com / June 13, 2012

A mosaic of the Huygens probe landing site, as seen by the descent imager/spectral radiometer (DIRS) on the Huygens probe. The mosaic is overlaid on a Cassini orbiter radar image, taken during a 2005, flyby. The landing site, marked by the red 'X,' is located in Titan's southern hemisphere.

ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/USGS

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An oasis of liquid methane has unexpectedly been discovered amid the tropical dunes of Saturn's moon Titan, researchers say.

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'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "off"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // --> NASA scientists used radar data to reconstruct surface features on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. They found that this frigid methane world has some striking similarities to places on Earth. From NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This lake in the otherwise dry tropics of?Titan?hints that subterranean channels of liquid methane might feed it from below, scientists added.

Titan has clouds, rain and lakes, like Earth, but these are composed of methane rather than water. However, methane lakes were seen only at Titan's poles until now ? its tropics around the equator were apparently home to dune fields instead.

Now near-infrared?pictures of Titan?from the Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn collected since 2004 suggest a vast methane lake exists on the surface in the moon's tropics, one about 925 square miles (2,400 square kilometers) large and at least three feet (1 meter) deep.

"Titan's tropical lake is roughly the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah during its lowest recorded level," study lead author Caitlin Griffith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona at Tucson, told SPACE.com. "Our work also suggests the existence of a handful of smaller and shallower ponds similar to marshes on Earth with knee- to ankle-level depths." [An Earth-like Lake on Titan (Video)]

A number of models of methane's behavior on Titan convincingly show that lakes are not stable at the moon's tropical latitudes. "Any liquid deposited in the tropical surface evaporates quickly and eventually is transported by Titan's circulation to the poles, where the large polar lakes appear," Griffith said.

"This discovery was absolutely not expected," Griffith said. "Lakes at the poles are easy to explain, but lakes in the tropics are not."

The researchers argue that these models of?methane's behavior on Titan?remain valid. The lake's presence during the moon's dry season several years before the arrival of seasonal tropical clouds and its long lifetime are evidence against it being a rain puddle, which would evaporate quickly.

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