Very far from the heat and light of the Sun, is Pluto, at the end of the Solar System. A new study reveals that its landscape is covered with ice volcanoes of a kind and to an extent that we have not seen again. The ice mountains southwest of Sputnik Planitia reach a height of 7 km and as the name of the cryop volcanoes suggests, these are volcanoes that instead of erupting hot lava erupt ice with volatile components but ammonia and methane. As soon as they come in contact with icy surface conditions, they freeze and create these mountains, just as lava creates mountains, calderas, etc.
One of the areas with very few impact craters has huge mountains. Similar features do not exist anywhere else in the Solar System. The existence of these huge features shows that Pluto’s internal structure and evolution allow it to retain heat, or at least that it has more heat than we expected before the New Horizons mission.
The New Horizons spacecraft revealed the existence of ice volcanoes on Pluto in 2015, giving us the most data scientists have ever had about a body near the Kuiper Belt. The Wright and Piccard Mountains were immediately recognized as ice volcanoes, huge cavities with deep holes in their center, similar to the lava volcanoes found elsewhere in the Solar System. The analysis of the data showed that the surface of Pluto was formed by this activity and in fact must have happened relatively recently in the history of the planet, since there is only one crater on the side of Mount Wright, indicating that it did not have enough time to fill craters from conflicts.
Creating a landscape on Sputnik Planitia would require multiple explosions and a huge amount of explosive material, about 10,000 cubic kilometers or 4 billion Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The processes that take place inside Pluto to produce ice volcanoes are not yet clear and their study is difficult, since we do not have a similar phenomenon on Earth. It is possible that there is a deep network of cracks under the ground, in which the frozen magma circulates.
The study indicates that even though it is frozen, Pluto is not dead and the dwarf planet still has a lot to learn about this phenomenon.
The extraction of icy material on the surface of a body with extremely low temperatures, low atmospheric pressure, low gravity and the plethora of ice species found on the surface of Pluto, make it unique in all the places we have visited in the Solar System.
The research was published in Nature Communications.
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