Categories

Enceladus spills its guts through strike–slip motion

Over the course of its elliptical orbit, the moon Enceladus is squeezed unevenly by Saturn’s gravitational pull and deforms from a spherical shape into a football shape and back again. This cyclic stress causes a phenomenon called “tidal heating” within Enceladus and dissipates enough energy to maintain what is believed to be a global ocean underneath the moon’s icy crust.

Go to Source

Comments are closed.