Gas clathrates are composed

The Southern Ocean is a critical component of global climate and carbon cycling. Although an overall regional carbon sink, observations indicate uptake behavior fluctuates on seasonal to decadal scales, and there is much uncertainty surrounding the drivers of that variability. Our focus is in the Drake Passage, the narrowest and southernmost constriction of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and a well sampled sector of the Southern Ocean.

Beneath the geologically complex ice shell of Europa, Jupiter’s innermost icy satellite, likely lies a vast, saline subsurface ocean that may hold conditions favorable for life. Key to that question is how processes in the ice shell, represented as a myriad of geologic features on the surface, facilitate material transport between the surface and subsurface ocean. The formation of the young, elliptically shaped surface disruptions, lenticulae and chaotic (chaos) terrain that range from < 10 km to > 1000 km diameter, may represent one such process.