Saturday, July 2, 2016

Creation Moment 7/3/2016 - Planetary Oceans?


But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it
cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.
Isaiah 57:20
"If Pluto and Enceladus have oceans under the crust, why are they still liquid after billions of years?
You can’t see them, but they must be there. Oceans under the crusts of planets and icy moons, inferred from orbital mechanics and geology, serve as working hypotheses to explain anomalies found by space probes. They were not predicted before the spacecraft sent back photos of weird
surfaces. Enceladus and Pluto are recent candidates for oceanic worlds.

Scientists on the New Horizons team have started considering an underground ocean at Pluto. In “Present-day subsurface ocean on Pluto?” Science Daily infers hidden sloshing seas from surface features that would have been different without a global ocean under the crust.

According to Astrobiology Magazine, this was not exactly a ho-hum expectation of planetary science:
That’s amazing to me,” Hammond said. “The possibility that you could have vast liquid water ocean habitats so far from the sun on Pluto — and that the same could also be possible on other Kuiper belt objects as well — is absolutely incredible.
Science Daily doesn’t answer how such an ocean could survive for billions of years, ....
Planetary scientists have been toying with subsurface oceans at Enceladus for the last decade since Cassini found geysers erupting. “An ocean lies a few kilometers beneath Saturn’s moon Enceladus’s icy surface,” Science Daily announced from indirect indications and physical models.

Back at Pluto another astonishing discovery has been refined: a super-canyon on the moon Charon that is longer and deeper than the Grand Canyon. It’s five times as deep as Arizona’s, Astrobiology Magazine says, and 150 miles longer – remarkable for a world much smaller than Earth. Another record may be set: “There appear to be locations along the canyon’s length where sheer cliffs reaching several miles high occur, and which could potentially rival Verona Rupes on Uranus’ moon Miranda (which is at least 3 miles, or 5 kilometers, high) for the title of tallest known cliff face in the solar system.”

These findings should represent severe problems for old-agers. Oceans on tiny icy worlds or dwarf planets should not last for billions of years, ...." CEH