Numerical modeling of endogenic thermal anomalies on Europa

A variety of recent resurfacing features have been observed on Europa, which may produce thermal anomalies detectable by a future mission. However, the likelihood of such a detection depends on their size and lifetimes. The results of this numerical study suggest that the lifetime of a thermal anomaly associated with the emplacement of 100 m of water onto the surface of Europa is several hundred years, and ∼10 years for 10 m of water. If warm ice is emplaced on the surface instead of liquid water, these lifetimes decrease by up to a factor of two. Exploration of model parameters indicates that a thin insulating surface layer can double thermal anomaly lifetimes, anomalies emplaced at a latitude of 80° can remain detectable nearly a factor of two longer than those at equatorial latitudes, and anomalies on the night side can remain detectable for up to ∼20% longer than those on the day side. High temperatures are very short-lived as the surface ice cools very rapidly to below 200 K due to sublimation cooling. Assuming steady-state resurfacing, the number of detectable thermal anomalies associated with the emplacement of 100 m of water would be on the order of 10 if the typical resurfacing area is 15 km². If recent resurfacing is dominated by chaos regions with typical areas of 100 to 1000 km² and lifetimes of 1000 to 4000 years, the number of detectable thermal anomalies would be on the order of 1 to 10.