The lakes on Saturn's largest moon create their own exotic weather patterns, say planetary scientists.
Back in 2005, the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe made a dramatic landing on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon Titan. During its descent through the dense nitrogen-rich atmosphere, Huygens sent back pictures of a complex landscape shaped by familiar forces.
But on Titan, where the temperature is -179 degrees Centigrade, water is a rock-hard frozen solid. Instead, it is methane that has shaped Titan’s surface, carving out rivers and deltas and shorelines because conditions there are curiously balanced around methane’s triple point. So it exists as a gas in the atmosphere, as liquid in the rivers and oceans and as a solid in ices.
In the past, planetary scientists have attempted to gauge the influence of lakes by looking at wind patterns in two dimensions. This work suggests that large bodies of liquid ought to stimulate “lake breezes, that spread out onto the land. Chatain also modelled specific lakes on Titan such as a 50km-wide lake called Oneida Lacus and other lakes around it to see how the local weather patterns interact. They found that bigger lakes generate stronger winds and that their individual weather patterns can merge to form a local microclimate with its own complex weather patterns.These winds have an important influence on evaporation into the atmosphere. Chatain and estimate that the lake evaporates at a rate of 6cm per Earth year .
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