04/25/2025
By Lynne Schaufenbil
Abstract: Europa, Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, likely harbors a subsurface ocean and is a key target for NASA’s Europa Clipper and ESA’s JUICE missions. Considered one of the most promising sites for extraterrestrial life, Europa may support life sustained by hydrothermal activity at the seafloor, which also drives ocean circulation. We used NASA’s ROCKE-3D model to simulate a 60-kilometer-deep ocean, heated from below and capped by a 15-kilometer-thick ice shell. Our analysis focuses on two key parameters: i) the Rossby number, which captures the influence of rotation and ii) the radius ratio, which defines the geometry of the tangent cylinder—both linked to measurable properties such as gravity, rotation rate, ocean depth, and ice thickness. Our simulations reveal an unstably stratified, perpetually convecting ocean with warm mid-latitude waters and cooler regions near the equator and poles. This thermal structure drives zonal jets, overturning circulation, and a rich eddy field, with jets dominating outside the tangent cylinder and eddies more active within it. By varying these parameters, we explore how circulation and vertical heat transport from the seafloor to the ice-ocean interface respond to changes in Europa’s internal structure. These results offer a framework for connecting spacecraft observations to subsurface dynamics and assessing how heat—and potentially biosignatures—might be advected from Europa’s seafloor to the ice shell, where space-based missions could detect them.
Bio: Kaushal Gianchandani is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT. His research lies at the intersection of physical oceanography and planetary science, with a focus on developing numerical models of ocean circulation on both Earth and ice-covered ocean worlds such as Europa and Enceladus. He completed his PhD in Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he studied the dynamics of Earth’s oceans during extreme climate states, including the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth and the Cretaceous greenhouse period. His work bridges paleoclimate modeling and planetary habitability, using fluid dynamics to understand how oceans transport heat and tracers on Earth and other ocean-bearing worlds.
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