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ENCELADUS

Keeping the ocean warm

More than 20 GW of power are necessary to balance the heat emitted by Enceladus and avoid the freezing of its
internal ocean. A very porous core undergoing tidal heating can generate the required power to maintain a liquid
ocean and drive hydrothermal activity.

Francis Nimmo

T
he Cassini spacecraft recently ended
its mission by plunging into Saturn.
One of the enduring legacies of this
mission will be the discovery that Enceladus,
a moon of Saturn, is geologically active,
spewing heat and water vapour into space1,2.
More recently, several lines of evidence
have confirmed the existence of a salty
ocean nestling beneath an ice shell that
may be only a few kilometres thick in some
places3,4. But many questions remain, in
particular understanding why Enceladus’s
internal ocean does not freeze, and why the
geological activity is restricted to the south
pole5. In this issue of Nature Astronomy,
Gaël Choblet and colleagues have proposed
a coherent model of Enceladus6 that helps
answer both of these questions.
Because Enceladus is small, it loses heat
rapidly and, as a result, a subsurface ocean
is hard to maintain. Early estimates of the
lifetime of such an ocean were only tens of
millions of years7, much less than the age
of the Solar System. Tidal heating would
help prolong an ocean, but if heating occurs
in the ice shell, much of the heat escapes
directly to the surface and does not warm
the ocean beneath.
The basic idea of Choblet et al. is that the
rocky core of Enceladus is deformable and is
heated by the changing gravitational tug of
Saturn. A hot core has two big advantages.
First, it is an efficient way of keeping the
ocean above from freezing. Second, if
the core is porous, then it will heat water
flowing through it, driving ‘hydrothermal’
circulation and chemical reactions, which
have been inferred from measurements of
the erupted material8,9.
This is not the first time that a
deformable core10 or hydrothermal
circulation11 have been suggested, but it is
the combination of these two ideas that gives
the model employed by Choblet et al. its
explanatory power. Tidal heating naturally
results in more heat being produced at
the poles, basically because tidal strains
are concentrated in a smaller area. In the
Choblet model, plumes of water heated by
the core rise through the ocean and melt
Nature Astronomy | VOL 1 | DECEMBER 2017 | 821–822 | www.nature.com/natureastronomy
© 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
Vapour plumes and
salty ice grains
Ice shell
Salty ocean
~3
0
km
~3
0
km
Circulating
water
~1
9 0
km Porous, tidally heated
rocky core
Fig. 1 | Sketch of the interior of Enceladus. Choblet et al. propose a tidally heated core driving
hydrothermal circulation6. The background internal structure is based on the model presented in ref. 13.
the ice at the south pole (Fig. 1). As with all But they have to extrapolate to lower
tidal heating proposals, by itself this model frequencies than are covered by existing
does not explain the absence of activity at measurements; more data on the response
the north pole. However, the authors suggest of granular materials at low frequencies
that feedback processes may amplify an would be very valuable.
initially small asymmetry in heating — for Ultimately, the power driving Enceladus’s
instance, enhanced deformation in one geological activity comes from the spin
part of the core would generate more local energy of Saturn. It has recently been
heat, making that part of the core more recognized that Saturn is delivering power
deformable, and so on. to Enceladus at a much higher rate than
The permeability of the core controls previously thought12, sufficient to keep
the temperature of water–rock interactions. the ocean liquid over billions of years5.
Since this temperature can be inferred On this kind of timescale, one would
from the chemistry of the erupted expect chemical reactions in the core to
species from the fractures at the south alter the permeability structure, and thus
pole, it allows Choblet et al. to deduce the location, of upwelling plumes. There
permeabilities similar to that of terrestrial is indeed some geological evidence that
sandstone. To infer how deformable the different areas of Enceladus were active in
core is, they make use of experimental the past5. Future studies that couple the
measurements on soils and gravel. feedback between tidal heating, permeability
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evolution and chemical reactions will be of
considerable interest.
An important lesson from Enceladus
is that even small amounts of chemical
information can be extremely useful. The
existence of a sub-surface ocean was first
demonstrated by chemical measurements3,
and Choblet and co-workers’ argument
for hydrothermal circulation is strongly
supported by the chemistry8,9. Space
agencies are increasingly recognizing the
importance of returning samples from other
worlds, especially for those where there is
some possibility of life having arisen, like
Mars, but also Enceladus. Since Enceladus’s
eruptions are providing us with free samples,
this small but surprising moon would seem
to be a natural target for such endeavours
in future. ❐ 5. Nimmo, F. et al. in Enceladus and the Icy Moons of Saturn (eds
Francis Nimmo
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz,
CA, USA.
e-mail: fnimmo@es.ucsc.edu
Published online: 1 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0337-4
References
1. Porco, C. C. et al. Science 311, 1393–1401 (2006).
2. Spencer, J. R. et al. Science 311, 1401–1405 (2006).
3. Postberg, F. et al. Nature 459, 1098–1101 (2009).
4. Thomas, P. C. et al. Icarus 264, 37–47 (2016).
Schenk, P. M. et al.) (Univ. Arizona Press, Tucson, in the press).
6. Choblet, G. et al. Nat. Astron. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-
0289-8 (2017).
7. Roberts, J. H. & Nimmo, F. Icarus 194, 675–689 (2008).
8. Hsu, H.-W. et al. Nature 519, 207–209 (2015).
9. Waite, J. H. et al. Science 356, 155–159 (2017).
10. Roberts, J. H. Icarus 258, 54–66 (2015).
11. Travis, B. J. & Schubert, G. Icarus 250, 32–42 (2015).
12. Fuller, J., Luan, J. & Quataert, E. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 458,
3867–3879 (2016).
13. Hemingway, D. et al. in Enceladus and the Icy Moons of Saturn (eds
Schenk, P. M. et al.) (Univ. Arizona Press, Tucson, in the press).

822 Nature Astronomy | VOL 1 | DECEMBER 2017 | 821–822 | www.nature.com/natureastronomy

© 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.