All terrestrial photos taken by and © Bruce G. Marcot.
Evidence of an alien ocean?
A
remarkable similarity ... frozen Baffin Bay, Canada, and the surface of
Europa.
On 2 June 2002, a long international plane
flight took me directly over Baffin Bay, Canada. As we soared above
the frozen expanse, I took the following photos:
Note the linear features and the more "scrambled" frozen surface texture.
Here too, the linear features seem to stretch for dozens if not hundreds
of kilometers across the surface of frozen Baffin Bay, northern Canada.
Now, compare the above images with this
next image of the surface of Europa, the frozen moon of Jupiter (taken
by the NASA spacecraft Galileo):
The features -- including the linear grooves and the scrambled frozen
surface -- are strikingly similar.
Zooming into the surface features --
First, here is Baffin Bay again, showing the frozen, "scrambled" surface texture:
... and here is the surface of Europa showing
a striking similarity:
Below is Baffin Bay again. Look closely
at the linear features, especially their internal parallel lines.
These linear features are fracture lines of surface ice, likely caused
by the lateral movement and refreezing of ice sheets as they floated on
a vast unfrozen waterbody below.
... And compare that with very similar-appearing
fracture lines on Europa, which may have formed in similar fashion, on
an alien ocean:
The similarities are indeed striking ... leading one to surely wonder if Europa is a frozen water world with an under-ice ocean ... perhaps teeming with life, as many astrobiologists hypothesize.
But I had not seen terrestrial ice features that so clearly resemble those on Europa until this chance flight over Baffin Bay.
Note that the images I took
of Baffin Bay were taken at a far lower altitude than the Europa images
were (by the NASA spacecraft Galileo). Thus, the surface features
of Europa -- particularly the linear fracture lines and the "scrambled"
icefield features -- are likely far larger in scale than the Baffin Bay
features.