New research into the Solar System's alien volcanoes reveal shocking discoveries. Many of these fiery wonders are similar to the volcanoes on Earth, and some might even have created the conditions for extraterrestrial life.
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LearningTranscript
00:02The landscapes of Earth have been shaped by volcanoes.
00:08We've long been in awe of their destructive beauty.
00:12But only recently have we discovered that volcanism exists beyond Earth.
00:19The planets and moons of the solar system have volcanoes that are even more extraordinary than those on our home
00:27planet.
00:27But what's most remarkable is what volcanic activity elsewhere in the solar system has told scientists about our own planet,
00:37Earth.
00:38What the Earth was like at its birth.
00:41Why we have the geology and the atmosphere we do.
00:45And even how life on Earth and possibly elsewhere originated.
01:03The volcanoes on Earth today are some of the most dangerous forces on the planet.
01:10But they are also creative.
01:13Forming new land and even the atmosphere that supports life.
01:19To understand how we got here, we need to know what Earth was like 4 billion years ago.
01:25A time when the whole planet was a seething sea of molten rock.
01:33Far out in the solar system, orbiting the huge planet Jupiter, there is a moon that mirrors these conditions of
01:40the early Earth.
01:43More volcanic than any other planetary body, this moon has given scientists a window into our own past.
01:53That's why our story begins on Io.
02:02Ashley Davies is a planetary volcanologist for NASA.
02:07He's long been fascinated by the moon of Io.
02:11One of the most important images that's ever been collected by any spacecraft was obtained by Voyager at Io.
02:24The image revealed this crescent rising above Io's surface.
02:29No one knew quite what this was.
02:31Could it be another moon behind Io or some artifact in the image?
02:36And then it was realized that this was actually a huge volcanic plume rising up from Io's surface.
02:49We now know that crammed into Io, the same size as our moon, are over 400 active volcanoes.
03:00Compare this to just 60 on the whole of Earth.
03:06The most powerful eruption was seen at a volcano called Sirt.
03:11A fissure opened up and a huge volume of lava literally gushed out of the ground to form large lava
03:18fountains kilometers high.
03:21When Sirt roars, it sends plumes of lava and ash over 300 miles into space.
03:36Io proved for the first time that Earth wasn't alone in having active volcanoes.
03:46The reason why Io is so active is it's caught in this gravitational tug of war between Jupiter, Io, Europa
03:56and Ganymede.
03:57And this pumps a lot of energy into the system.
04:04The gravitational forces twist and turn Io, causing interior heating.
04:09This heating manifests at the surface in the form of huge volcanoes.
04:18Our own planet Earth is not squashed and squeezed.
04:22Much of its internal heat comes from when it first formed.
04:28But Io is heated up so much, it might erupt an extremely rare and hot form of lava called Ultramafic.
04:40Ultramafic lava was abundant 4 billion years ago, as the Earth was born.
04:47But no longer.
04:51To discover this primitive lava on Io would offer scientists a window on the past.
05:07Volcanologist Rosalie Lopez does her research in Hawaii.
05:11We're studying volcanoes on Hawaii, not because of Hawaii itself, but because Hawaiian volcanoes are such a good analog or
05:22a mirror, if you like, for volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io.
05:27Rosalie will measure the cooling rate of the lava here in Hawaii, and then apply it to the volcanoes of
05:34Io.
05:36In this way, she hopes to find out if Io has the especially hot Ultramafic lava.
05:44The team uses a thermal camera.
05:47Yeah, they should make nice images.
05:49Oh, very nice.
05:50Very nice.
05:51Yeah, and then just really hot in the middle.
05:53Boy, that's cooling so fast.
05:55Oh, that's beautiful.
05:57Just spectacular.
05:58Yeah.
06:00The hottest lava is the moment it emerges.
06:04Even on the hottest parts, it was only about 9, 10 Celsius.
06:09The melting temperature of this rock is about 1200 Celsius.
06:13So that tells you that even in those red hot parts, the lava has cooled, you know, more than a
06:21couple hundred Celsius.
06:23So lava cools very, very fast.
06:28Rosalie suspects this also happens on Io.
06:33Space probes to Io have revealed that the surface hot spots are 1200 degrees.
06:41It means the temperature of the lava just below the surface of Io must be around 1400 degrees.
06:51Lava this hot is strong evidence it's Ultramafic.
07:02An exciting finding as it means Io could hold the secrets of the Earth's past.
07:11Io is a model of the early Earth because the lavas on Io may be of the Ultramafic type.
07:19And those are lavas that are very hot, very primitive, and they erupted on Earth billions of years ago.
07:28The more we research Io, the more we find out what the Earth was like as it was forming.
07:34The type of lava flows.
07:36The form of volcanism.
07:37The tremendous density of volcanoes.
07:42So Io reveals what primitive Earth was like.
07:48Dante's volcanic inferno.
07:54Although the Earth of today is far less volcanic than it once was,
07:59it remains geologically a very active planet.
08:04A good way of understanding why Earth still retains much of its volcanism.
08:10Is to contrast it with other planetary bodies.
08:14That might have lost their volcanism.
08:24The Apollo missions weren't just about the space race.
08:28They were also the most ambitious geological field trips of all time.
08:34A key aim was to discover if volcanoes had helped create the Moon.
08:40And, if so, were any still active.
08:46In the 1960s, Jim Head was a keen young geologist, who had to teach the astronauts all about rocks.
08:55Before the Apollo program, we didn't even know whether the Moon had volcanism.
08:58For example, some people thought it was a cold Moon.
09:01Some people thought it was a warm Moon, which had heating inside and volcanism.
09:04So this is a big question. Was it even volcanic rock?
09:072,000 feet.
09:08These dark-looking planes of the Moon were particularly tantalizing to scientists.
09:14They're called the Seas, or the Meria.
09:19Beautiful view.
09:20Isn't that something?
09:21Magnificent desolation.
09:24To find out exactly what they were, the first Apollo landing was to Mare Tranquilitatis, the Sea of Tranquility.
09:31Okay, ready for me to come out? All set.
09:35As the astronauts explored the dusty and rocky surface, they recognized basalt, the most common volcanic rock found on Earth.
09:46If the lava is coming up from great depths, given the gravity, etc., you'll get a lot of lava coming
09:53out, commonly much more than you see on the Earth, and so it flows great distances.
09:57And so we have lava flows that go over 1,000 kilometers, like incredible, okay?
10:03It would go halfway across the United States, no problem.
10:06Another mysterious feature found on the Moon was these winding canyons, or sinuous rills.
10:14These channels were up to 1,300 feet deep, and over 60 miles long.
10:22Clues as to what created them can be found back on Earth.
10:42The country of Iceland has an extraordinary range of geological features.
10:51This curious tunnel through solid rock appears almost man-made.
11:00Groh-Petersen wants to track down what used to flow through it.
11:06You can actually see how the lava has been running along the wall here.
11:11And you can see also that it was very hot in here because some of this lava re-melted and
11:17basically were dribbling down the wall.
11:19You see that here.
11:22It's a lava tube, and long ago lava was surging through these tunnels.
11:29One of the very exciting things people found on the Moon was these sinuous rills.
11:34And, of course, before people actually had been on the Moon, they were thought to potentially be water eroded.
11:42But then people have gone to the Moon, and it has been studied much more, and they found out that
11:46these sinuous rills were always connected with the maria, the moon lavas that we have up there.
11:55Perhaps these sinuous rills were once enclosed lava tubes.
11:59So one of the things that you see here, obviously, is that we have what we call skylights.
12:05So the roof has collapsed.
12:06If all of the roof collapses, you will end up with a valley like something you see on the Moon.
12:12But you can also see the tubes on the Moon by a string of skylights, just as we see here,
12:19one hole after the other.
12:20And you just follow them, you trace them down, and you can see that these are within lava flows.
12:26But when did these eruptions take place?
12:29And why did they eventually stop?
12:34The answer would come in small bags of volcanic rocks brought home by the astronauts.
12:42On Earth, they could be accurately dated.
12:45So when the moon rocks were brought back, it's like unbelievable.
12:48Okay, this we can tell four billion year old rocks.
12:51This is the keys to the understanding of the solar system.
12:55Like other planetary bodies made of rock, the moon was a mass of hot molten magma as it was forming.
13:01It's an amazing thought that you could have been standing on Earth and looked up on the moon and see
13:07these massive eruptions happening.
13:11But all the time it was cooling.
13:14Being relatively small, a quarter of the diameter of the Earth, the moon cooled down quickly.
13:21By three billion years ago, almost all the lava and interior magma had solidified into one big lump of cold
13:29rock.
13:30No more volcanoes.
13:35But you see the remnants of it.
13:37I mean, when you look at the sky and you look at the moon, you see the evidence of the
13:41volcanism,
13:41because you see the dark areas, the basalt, which has filled in the craters.
13:48But the Earth was much larger, and this helped it retain lots of its original heat and magma.
13:57And so today, our planet is a dynamic and ever-changing world rather than a dead one.
14:06So the lunar exploration really opened up a field of really planetary volcanology.
14:11One of the first of our neighboring planets to be studied in detail was Mars, the red planet.
14:23Research on Mars has also revealed more about the geology of our own planet, Earth.
14:30This is because it soon became apparent that Mars also had astonishing volcanoes.
14:38When the probes first reached the red planet, one feature stood out above swirling sandstorms.
14:45The volcano, Olympus Mons.
14:49Olympus Mons is enormous. It's about 25 kilometers high.
14:53Most commercial aircraft fly 10 to 15 kilometers.
14:57So you're looking at something that's towering way above what commercial aircraft might fly.
15:03It's three times the height of Mount Everest, making it the largest volcano ever discovered in the solar system.
15:14Finding out how it grew to be so colossal tells scientists more about the volcanoes of Earth.
15:22A team of volcanologists is investigating this mountain in Iceland to compare it to Olympus Mons.
15:32It's called Skalbridor, which means broad shield, as its slopes are reminiscent of a shield.
15:42Although small in stature, it's of great significance.
15:49This shield volcano is the one over which all the other volcanoes of this type are called in the solar
15:57system and on the Earth.
15:58So this is the first one, in many senses, the first one to be named the shield.
16:04It's only about half a mile high, just a 25th the height of Olympus Mons.
16:10But crucially, it's the same type of shield volcano.
16:14At the summit is the crater.
16:17Around the rim are mysterious shaped rocks.
16:21They look almost like fossilized snakes.
16:24Yet they give a hint how this type of volcano forms and what gives it the distinctive shield shape.
16:32Shield volcanoes comprise lavas that are very runny because the shapes of them, this broad shield shape, tells us it
16:38has to be made.
16:39And we have the evidence in front of our eyes of these small tubes, these entrails, running down the size
16:45of the volcano, telling us that indeed it had to be very runny.
16:49This fast flowing lava creates the gentle slopes of all shield volcanoes, including the largest one of all on Mars.
16:59But while shield volcanoes in Iceland have just one crater at the summit, Olympus Mons has six overlapping craters.
17:10That's the key. We actually can use what we see in Iceland to say what we see in Mars is
17:16similar, but also different.
17:17It has to be much, much longer lived with multiple phases of eruptions to produce these multiple summit craters we
17:24see on Olympus Mons.
17:29When this behemoth erupted, Mars shuttered.
17:39But Earth is twice the size of Mars, so why don't we have volcanoes as enormous as Olympus Mons?
18:02Mars is home to the solar system's most massive volcano, Olympus Mons, and it dwarfs anything on Earth.
18:10How is that possible, given Earth is twice the size of Mars?
18:15Mars is home to the solar system's most massive volcano, Olympus Mons, and it dwarfs anything on Earth.
18:17The Earth is a huge plate tectonics.
18:20Earth is made up of seven huge plates drifting above a sea of magma.
18:29The circulation of magma recycles rocks and gases, bringing them to the surface and then back down again.
18:41Iceland is the perfect place to witness plate tectonics in action.
18:47This rift is where the North American plate, to the left, divides from its Eurasian cousin to the right.
18:57The rift is widening rapidly, at an inch a year.
19:03Mars, like all other planets we know of, has no active plate tectonics.
19:13The entire crust of Mars remains locked in place, with repercussions for its volcanoes.
19:22Any upwelling magma continually breaks through at one fixed location.
19:28So it's a very focused eruption of magma for billions of years, and what happens is you just end up
19:36with a huge volcano, the biggest in the solar system.
19:42While Mars is no longer volcanically active, it does share an important feature with Earth.
19:48The polar ice caps.
19:52The story of these ice caps has been revealed through unusually shaped volcanoes.
20:00They have steep sides and a flat top, like a table.
20:06Scientists now believe they might have been formed when volcanoes exploded through an ancient ice sheet.
20:18To understand how ice can change the behavior of lava, scientists are carrying out an extreme experiment.
20:29For this, Inger Sonder and Tracy Gregg need to make their own lava.
20:37Out of 110 pounds of basalt rock.
20:41We're turning it to its lava state, and the students have built a little ramp that the lava will pour
20:47down and pool at the end.
20:49And at the end of this lava stream, there'll be a little pond of ice.
20:52So the lava is going to flow over the ice.
20:55We think, we know this has happened on Earth.
20:57We think it's happened on Mars in the past.
21:00So we'll see what happens.
21:07There, look where it hits the ice, it's boiling because the ice is melting and then flashing to steam.
21:14And it's creating all those bubbles there on the lava.
21:17Whoa!
21:18And now, this is what happens when the lava melts the ice and there's enough water and we're getting some
21:26little steam explosion.
21:29Right, there's no more lava coming out of the furnace, but underneath that black crust, it's still liquid.
21:35It's slowly flowing down.
21:38And you can see where it's ponded over the ice, there's some heaving going on as gas is trying to
21:45escape.
21:46The experiment lets Tracy identify key features as molten rock interacts with ice.
21:53When the lava hit the ice, a couple of things happened really fast.
21:57The lava started to bubble as the ice melted and then flashed to steam.
22:02And then, as more melt occurred, there were actually puddles of water that started to boil and spatter, just like
22:08on your stove.
22:09Right, the water's spattering.
22:11Where the ice wasn't, we have nice, neat, organized flows, folds in the lava.
22:16And right where the ice starts, we get these bigger bubbles on the surface.
22:20Look, that one's broken open, you can see inside.
22:22That's the kind of thing we could look for on Mars, right, to see if there was any lava-ice
22:27interactions on Mars.
22:31The artificial volcano confirms that lava behaves very differently when it meets ice.
22:39But what happens out in the real world?
22:55Modern day volcanoes on Iceland give us clues to how unique formations on Mars were created.
23:01One of the most distinctive types of volcano in Iceland is called a tuya.
23:07Wherever we see volcanoes that look like this on Iceland, we know that the ice has been there.
23:13And if we see the same sorts of volcanoes on Mars, we've got a good idea, or a very good
23:17idea, that there was ice present.
23:21Mapping the tuyas on Mars reveals the coverage and depth of the ancient ice sheets.
23:30The volcanoes of Mars have revealed much about the geological history of our own Earth.
23:37But volcanoes have played a key role in the evolution of planets in another way.
23:42By creating their atmosphere.
23:50The most extreme atmosphere of all the planets of the solar system is found on Venus.
23:57And because it's so extreme, it's the ideal planet to find out more about how volcanoes help make an atmosphere.
24:08It has the densest atmosphere anywhere in the solar system.
24:16And one of the hottest.
24:20This extreme atmosphere was almost certainly like this because of volcanoes that pumped out these gases.
24:30But scientists could not confirm this, as the atmosphere also hid what was happening on the planet's surface.
24:39So we really didn't have much of an idea of what was beneath those clouds, and it was a bit
24:43of guesswork.
24:43You know, you send the probes down, are we going to survive, what's the atmospheric pressure going to be, how
24:48hot is it going to be.
24:55But a new generation of probes armed with radar eventually peered through the veil of Venus to reveal an astonishing
25:03landscape.
25:07More volcanic cones and craters than any other planet of the solar system.
25:13We thought this is a planet with a lot of volcanoes on it, and even more fascinating, volcanoes unlike any
25:19we see on the Earth.
25:21These volcanoes are unique to Venus.
25:27Some are 40 miles across, surrounded by cliffs almost half a mile high.
25:35Almost perfectly circular, they're known as pancake domes.
25:39We're so untypical of what else we saw on Venus.
25:43And that's when people started thinking, well, the sort of lava flows on Earth where we actually have these same
25:47features,
25:48are these lava flows we have in places like Iceland?
25:55What could pancake domes tell us about volcanism on Earth?
26:01These are the extraordinary lava flows at Torfajokl in Iceland.
26:09They end in cliffs similar to the pancake domes, but on a smaller scale.
26:15Dave McGarvey and Ian Skilling hope to discover even more about the lava that created these surreal landscapes.
26:22So, you can see lots of little white crystals actually aligned in that particular direction.
26:28And these only line up when you've got something that's very, very sticky and forcing crystals to actually line up
26:34in one direction.
26:35And in this case, I know these crystals are telling me this rock is very high in silica.
26:44Silica thickens the lava, and Dave and Ian believe that this was what created the pancake domes on Venus.
26:52It behaves differently from thin lava.
26:58The most common type of lava we have in the solar system is basalt, and the entire surface of the
27:03moon, the entire surface of Mars is covered in basalt.
27:06And I'm going to illustrate that by using oil.
27:14Spreads out where it wants to go.
27:16Beautiful little fingers coming down.
27:18Thin and fast.
27:20However, in some parts of the Earth, and these pancake domes on Venus, which is very exciting.
27:26We've got this much thicker lava flow, and I'm going to illustrate that with treacle.
27:30And let's see how that goes.
27:35Beautiful.
27:36See how slow and how thick it is?
27:39That is exactly what we expect to see when we've got these thicker lava flows that are much richer in
27:44silica.
27:45But are any volcanoes on Venus still active?
27:50Some exciting circumstantial evidence has recently been discovered.
27:55They found that Venus had hot spots within it that occurred over quite a short time interval.
28:02And this was the first evidence we had of perhaps something active on Venus.
28:10This image of the planet's surface was taken on June 22, 2008.
28:15The hottest parts are yellow and red.
28:19And the same area just two days later.
28:23The best explanation of these new hot spots is erupting lava.
28:29We're also seeing unexplained spikes of sulfur in the atmosphere,
28:33which are probably related to these bursts of hot activity appearing on the surface.
28:38And it's all these active volcanoes that create the atmosphere.
28:48But any eruptions here will be highly unusual because the atmosphere is so dense, equivalent on Earth to half a
28:56mile deep below the ocean.
29:00I can't see there being any way that you're going to get any substantial amount of explosive activity taking place
29:06on Venus.
29:06Nothing like the amount we get on Earth, simply because the atmosphere is suppressing the explosions on Venus.
29:13But why haven't all the volcanoes of Earth led to a similar dense and hostile atmosphere on our own planet?
29:35Volcanoes are known as forces of destruction, but they're also one of the most powerful creators on our planet.
29:43Claire Cousins is an astrobiologist.
29:46She's been coming to Iceland for 10 years, as this is the ideal place to find out how volcanoes can
29:53help support life.
29:56Claire and her colleagues are tapping into the gases of a volcanic vent.
30:03Many of these gases are highly toxic.
30:08So we wear these gas masks while we're sampling these volcanic gases because they're what we call acidic gases.
30:16So they're things like carbon dioxide or hydrogen sulfide.
30:20And they're basically gases that we just don't want to be breathing in. They're really poisonous.
30:27But surprisingly, the most abundant gas is actually water vapor, 97% at this site.
30:37Volcanoes, they're not just destructive processes.
30:40On the long term, especially, they produce a huge amount of essential ingredients for life, basically, particularly water.
30:50Earth's early atmosphere and oceans were created by volcanism, pumping water and gas into the primeval sky.
30:57Through this whole process, volcanoes actually deliver to the surface of the planet many fundamental ingredients required by life.
31:04In contrast, Venus, without plate tectonics, pumped ever more gases into her atmosphere.
31:13Over time, this dense atmosphere created a hell planet.
31:18This made it impossible for life to survive on Venus.
31:22But elsewhere in the solar system, volcanoes have been the crucible for life.
31:35All life that we know of needs heat, liquid water, and an energy-rich foodstuff.
31:43On Earth, volcanoes provide all three.
31:48If they can do this for life here, volcanoes might support life beyond Earth.
32:00At a volcanic hot spot in Iceland, Claire is searching for unusual life forms that can survive here.
32:08Microbes that live in these very hot or very acidic environments, they've evolved to live here and they wouldn't actually
32:14grow in our conditions.
32:20Mars had very similar environments where volcanism met ice.
32:26This makes it a good candidate for evidence of extraterrestrial life.
32:36Iceland acts as a useful parallel, and here, Claire tests the water for sulfur, which certain bacteria can feed on.
32:46The intensity of the blue tells you how much sulfide is dissolved in the water, how much food there is
32:52for the microbes to eat.
32:55Claire believes that life on Earth, and possibly Mars, could have originated in a volcanic hot spot just like this.
33:05But Mars is not the only planetary body where volcanism is closely linked to ice.
33:26Linda Spilker is head of the team that runs the Cassini probe that's been exploring Saturn and her moons.
33:34Linda is most interested in the moon called Enceladus.
33:37Enceladus is only about 500 kilometers across, and that's only about one-seventh the size of our own moon.
33:45And that tiny moon we think should have been frozen solid.
33:49And if you look carefully, you notice it doesn't look like our moon at all.
33:53Our moon is covered with craters and it's dark, but this is bright icy white and very few craters.
34:00As the Cassini probe approached Enceladus, Linda observed something never seen before on a planetary body.
34:10If you look carefully, you can actually see individual geysers coming up and shooting out into space.
34:17And what a surprise. We just, everyone was in awe and amazement to see this level of activity.
34:27These eruptions are not molten rock.
34:31They are geysers, water and ice, fountaining over 400 miles into space.
34:41It means that liquid water, deep below the surface, is being forced upwards by heat.
34:49The material erupts so high that it's actually become part of Saturn's rings.
34:59So all along, visible evidence of volcanic activity was present in the rings of Saturn.
35:06But scientists hadn't even realized.
35:14Coming out of the geysers, there's water vapor, there's tiny particles.
35:19If you'd stand near one of these cracks on Enceladus and put out your hand, it would almost be like
35:25it was snowing.
35:25These tiny particles would fall back down. And that's why there's no craters.
35:31So how are these extraordinary geysers of ice and water formed?
35:41Again, Iceland provides a powerful analogy.
35:52This is the Strucker geyser.
35:59So what we have here, rather than molten lava coming out of the ground,
36:04as you typically get through your regular volcano,
36:06what we have here is actually just water, just ground water which is within the ground
36:11and it's being heated up by these magma chambers which are actually much further, deeper underground.
36:17And this water gets super heated until it just can't stay underground anymore.
36:21And all that steam and all that energy, just like in a normal volcano,
36:24will just erupt all of that water to the surface.
36:29For me, Enceladus is one of the most exciting places, I think, in the solar system.
36:34to go and explore.
36:35It's, for reasons exactly like that, it's one of the other places in the solar system
36:40where we actually have this active hydrothermal activity.
36:44But with all this activity, does this mean that Enceladus is capable of having liquid water?
37:03Saturn's mysterious moon, Enceladus, may have something in common with Earth.
37:08It may contain liquid water.
37:10The geysers of Enceladus are so powerful, scientists suspect there must be huge amounts of water below the icy surface.
37:25And some clever detective work on the unusual spin of the moon has confirmed the hidden ocean below.
37:34On Enceladus, 5,000 fixed features such as canyons were observed over time
37:40to identify any tiny shifts in position.
37:46In this way, astronomers have discovered that the moon did indeed wobble about its axis, a tenth of a degree.
37:55A wobble this size proved there had to be an ocean sloshing around below,
38:00and even gave its depth up to 20 miles deep.
38:08We know what's inside Saturn's moon.
38:13We can't even say that with certainty about our own moon,
38:15because it doesn't volunteer stuff quite so readily.
38:18And the stuff coming out of Enceladus is water mixed with other stuff.
38:23You wouldn't want to drink it, it'd be like drinking the ocean water.
38:26But it's mostly water, and where we find water and energy,
38:30there's a chance that there might be something able to survive or evolve in there.
38:37It is full of salts and organic compounds,
38:41some of the key building blocks of life.
38:47So we wonder, could Enceladus also have life very similar to the life on Earth?
38:54Is it like the same kind of life we have here on Earth?
38:58Is it something totally different that we can't imagine?
39:06The hunt for volcanoes elsewhere continues to produce amazing breakthroughs.
39:14Even the remotest of new space volcanoes can have relevance to the geology of Earth.
39:24After a nine-year odyssey, the New Horizons probe finally reached Pluto in July 2015.
39:34What it discovered was astonishing.
39:39The New Horizons spacecraft that just visited Pluto found features that have every indication of being cryovolcanic.
39:47Mountains, shield-like mountains, flows on the surface.
39:52Completely unexpected, just an extraordinary discovery which just shows us how exciting the game can be.
40:00This is Wright Mons on Pluto.
40:03At 100 miles across and two miles high,
40:07it's believed to be the largest cryovolcano in the solar system.
40:15It's driven by a similar process of mountain formation as on Earth.
40:21But instead of molten rock, it's built up from flowing ice.
40:28A rare event on Earth called frazil ice reveals how freezing water can sometimes behave in a similar way to
40:36lava.
40:39During winter, it's occasionally observed in Yosemite National Park.
40:45A slowly flowing river of chunks of ice, given the right conditions, suddenly freezes solid.
40:54What happens when we see frazil ice on Earth is it is so close to its freezing point.
40:59That's why it's filled with ice crystals.
41:01And if it cools down just enough, suddenly all the water that's liquid between those ice crystals freezes.
41:08And it happens just like that.
41:11And it's entirely possible that that same process could be happening on the surface of Pluto.
41:25The discovery of all these different space volcanoes has revolutionized our knowledge of volcanism throughout the solar system.
41:35It's so important to study volcanism in a solar system because it fills in the missing places in our thinking
41:41about how this whole process works.
41:44The discovery of volcanoes elsewhere has made us look at Earth in a new light.
41:51It's very likely that we can understand more about what might happen to Earth in the far future.
41:57We can look at Mars and Venus, for example.
42:00So we can use these other planets to teach us about volcanism, climate change, and other aspects of planetary evolution.
42:08And space volcanoes have changed how we search for life elsewhere.
42:14In exploring Enceladus, it's very clear from what we've learned that we need to go back to learn more.
42:20Is there really and truly life on Enceladus?
42:23Where there's volcanism, there might be life.
42:28Where there's volcanism, there might be life.
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