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Science 15 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5806, pp. 1764 - 1766
DOI: 10.1126/science.1133519
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Reports

A Clathrate Reservoir Hypothesis for Enceladus' South Polar Plume

Susan W. Kieffer,1* Xinli Lu,1 Craig M. Bethke,1 John R. Spencer,2 Stephen Marshak,1 Alexandra Navrotsky3

We hypothesize that active tectonic processes in the south polar terrain of Enceladus, the 500-kilometer-diameter moon of Saturn, are creating fractures that cause degassing of a clathrate reservoir to produce the plume documented by the instruments on the Cassini spacecraft. Advection of gas and ice transports energy, supplied at depth as latent heat of clathrate decomposition, to shallower levels, where it reappears as latent heat of condensation of ice. The plume itself, which has a discharge rate comparable to Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park, probably represents small leaks from this massive advective system.

1 Department of Geology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 1301 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
2 Department of Space Studies, Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut Street, Suite 400, Boulder, CO 80302, USA.
3 Thermochemistry Facility and Nanomaterials in the Environment, Agriculture, and Technology (NEAT) Organized Research Unit (ORU), University of California at Davis, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: skieffer{at}uiuc.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
From the Cover: Unified model of tectonics and heat transport in a frigid Enceladus.
G. Gioia, P. Chakraborty, S. Marshak, and S. W. Kieffer (2007)
PNAS 104, 13578-13581
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