82-4 Regional Geologic Mapping on Europa

Session: Friends of Hoth, Episode IX: The Rise of Icy Ocean Worlds

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Abstract:

Evaluating the potential habitability of the icy ocean worlds of the outer planets requires an understanding of three main components: the chemistry and composition of the material making up the body, the sources of chemical disequilibrium available for potential metabolic processes, and the geologic processes that drive the interaction between the surface and the deeper interior of the body. For Jupiter’s moon Europa, investigations in the latter area, geology, have generally focused on specific types of geologic landforms, removed from the broader global geologic context. Where regional geologic mapping has taken place, the maps lack a consistent set of units among each other and a defined mapping scale. The current inconsistency in units, mapping scale, and relative age dating and correlation of features across existing regional maps limits the ability to assess the maps in context or in comparison to one another. The recent production of a 1:15M global geologic map addresses this problem at a global scale but needs to be applied to the regional scale (1:2M) and put in the global context. Building on the 1:15M global geologic map, we have initiated regional mapping of six distinct areas—Flows, Moytura Regio, Conamara Chaos, Leading and Trailing pole-to-pole mosaics, and Wedges Terrain. These six regions were imaged by Galileo at a regional scale (images with a resolution of 100’s of m/pixel), covering ~10% of Europa’s surface. This work will ultimately result in 9 geologic maps: 3 new geologic maps produced at a scale of 1:2M from the USGS Global Europa basemap; 3 digitized geologic maps from the literature; and 3 modified versions of the digitized maps that are made consistent in terms of units, linework, and scale with the 1:2M regional maps. These 9 maps, which will be produced using the current USGS Global basemap of Europa, would be a valuable tool to the broader science community to understand the characteristics of the global geologic units and their variability across Europa at finer scale. The resulting consistent set of regional-scale units and their stratigraphic relationships can also serve as input to geologic and geophysical models to better understand how the surface of Europa has evolved over time.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-9983

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