45-5 Exploring Europa’s Icy Surface Using Water Ice Boulders

Session: Surface Processes Across the Solar System (Posters)

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Abstract:

Enceladus and Europa are both icy satellites that share similar geologic features, leading to the hypotheses that formation and degradation processes that occur on their surfaces should be similar. In this project, we investigated that hypothesis by identifying and analyzing the presence of ice boulders on the surface of Europa and compared those results to Enceladus. The results expand our knowledge of ice boulders on Europa’s surface by gathering information about location, size, and distribution of the boulders on the surface. We mapped a total of 1,988 ice boulders with diameters from ~29-201 m across the surface of Europa in eight regions that had been imaged at high resolution (6-20 m per pixel) by the Solid-State Imager (SSI) on NASA’s Galileo mission. The boulders were manually identified, assigned a confidence rating, and their sizes measured using ArcGIS. We tested the data for spatial patterns of boulders on the surface. We found clusters in three regions that appear to be statistically significant. We found that the overall spatial density of boulders on Europa ranges from 1.01 to 14.37 km^-2 across the eight regions studied. This is significantly lower than 0.12 to 0.66 km^-2 reported for areas of Enceladus, investigated by Pajola et al. (2021). Our results show that there are substantially fewer boulders present on the surface of Europa compared to the surface of Enceladus. Thus, we conclude that formation and degradation processes for ice boulders on Europa and Enceladus must differ. We investigated possible boulder formation processes on Europa which includes impact cratering and mass wasting. Further research will help us to understand the cause of the differences between these icy bodies. We plan on continuing to research this topic further by evaluating more regions on Europa using high resolution mosaics (up to 35 m per pixel) and continuing to research boulder formation and degradation processes.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 58, No. 2, 2026

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