Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System by Natalie Starkey

Author:Natalie Starkey [Starkey, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science, Space Science, General, nature, Earthquakes & Volcanoes, Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Seismology & Volcanism, Sky Observation
ISBN: 9781472960382
Google: aD8gEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-09-30T23:53:37.783262+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Warming Up

Whether we’re looking at the stiflingly hot volcanoes of Earth, or the freezing cold cryovolcanoes of Enceladus or even Pluto, they have one thing in common. The important similarity that makes them the volcanically active places they are – whether hot or cold – is a difference in temperature between their insides and outsides. It might not sound very important, but it is this contrast that fuels their activity. It really all comes down to a nifty bit of physics.

Put simply: heat moves. Heat has a natural tendency to flow from a higher temperature reservoir to a lower temperature one. In planetary bodies, the result of this heat transfer causes materials to become buoyant and move in the form of ice or rock, whatever is their ‘magma’, so that they rise to the surface of a body. What erupts at the surface simply depends on where the planetary body is located within the Solar System, where it formed, and from what material it was originally made. Whatever the case, as soon as a planet or moon forms, it is looking to cool off, to lose its initial heat and solidify. Nevertheless, there are some factors working against this cooling.

The way in which planetary bodies produced their initial heat, even if they have always been formed of ice, and how they cooled down after, is not necessarily a shared process; each might have got its heat from a different source, such as the heat of formation (primordial heat) or tidal heating, for example, and they might have cooled in different ways: one might have been more volcanically active, another might have had a surface layer that insulated heat. Each planetary object heated up and cooled down in a different way, and the mix of processes is unique to each one.

A planetary body’s cooling history is not simply related to its location in the Solar System, as there are other factors at play. Just because a planet is close to the Sun doesn’t mean that its interior is necessarily hot, and those far from the Sun are not necessarily cold. It turns out that some planetary bodies are self-sufficient, producing their own heat, while others rely on generating it from the effects of external forces acting on them from neighbouring planetary bodies. I’ll explain more about this shortly. Yet other planetary bodies are just geologically dead, no longer able to generate heat for themselves or find a way to get it from elsewhere, having cooled very quickly after they formed.

The amount of heat a planetary body can trap or generate itself, and how quickly it loses it, is an important control on the overall evolution of the body on a very grand scale. A planetary body that has cooled too quickly or slowly has no chance of hosting life. Without heat, a body itself cannot be active, and without activity moving heat around from the inside to the outside, surface processes such as geological activity, the growth of an atmosphere and the maintenance of liquid water or other solvents at the surface are not possible.

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