Prometheus: Io's wandering plume

Science

Volumn 288, Issue 5469, 2000, Pages 1204-1208

  Kieffer, Susan W ^a   Lopes Gautier, Rosaly ^b   McEwen, Alfred ^c   Smythe, William ^b   Keszthelyi, Laszlo ^c   Carlson, Robert ^b  

^a S W Kieffer Sci Consulting Inc   (Canada)

^b CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

SULFUR DIOXIDE;

IO; PLUME; VOLCANISM;

ARTICLE; ENTROPY; HEAT TRANSFER; PHYSICAL MODEL; PLUME; PRIORITY JOURNAL; TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE; VAPORIZATION; VOLCANO;

COLD; ENTROPY; EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENVIRONMENT; HEAT; ICE; JUPITER; MODELS, CHEMICAL; SNOW; SPACECRAFT; VOLCANIC ERUPTION;

EID: 0034685999     PISSN: 00368075     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5469.1204     Document Type: Article

References (23)

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12. If the lava flows in the western delta were thinner than 1 m, they could not produce the extensive sheet flows observed in the 124 and 127 SSI images (1). If they were much thicker than 100 m, shadowed scarps would be visible at the flow margins. Based on the interpretation that the Prometheus lavas are inflated pahoehoe (1), and observations of similar inflated flows in the same size range on Earth, we suggest that the thickness of warm lava in the Prometheus lava "delta" is likely to be a few tens of meters.
13. We have based the density estimate on the assumption that the observed high temperatures for the lava flows (2) indicate a lava of mafic, that is, relatively dense, composition.
14. -1. Under the fortuitous conditions considered here, the latent heat supplied by crystallization of the lava is almost exactly equal to the heat required for melting of the snow and the terms cancel in the conservation equations [M. Necati Ozisik, Boundary Value Problems of Heat Conduction (Dover, New York, 1968)]. Thermal conductivity could be appreciably lower if the lava is porous, or if temperatures are extremely high, perhaps by an order of magnitude. Lower values of thermal conductivity would extend the time scales calculated here.
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23. Portions of this work were performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. We also thank T. Johnson for pointing out that we had Prometheus bound if we had a mechanism to stop the motion of the plume.