What Does an Alien Ocean Look Like?

a bit of a different video today this one all starts with a question you read the title what does an alien ocean look like after hearing this your brain can only be thinking one of two things either that's an oddly specific question or what does an alien ocean look like if the first thought was yours well i don't think you'll fit in here but if you not can't stop wondering the same thing as me well then let me take you for a ride first stop earth the closest alien ocean we'll find if you don't think this place is alien then you're not looking hard enough the dominant compound here is dihydrogen monoxide excuse me i'm in water which covers up most of the planet's surface while this reservoir is where over 96 of our water ends up for this to be a functioning ocean the moisture needs to cycle around the planet in what's called the hydrosphere lucky for us ours does just that starting with water evaporating into the atmosphere as vapor traveling upwards the air cools and the moisture holding capacity decreases forcing some of the water to condense into clouds these two factors air humidity and weather make up the atmospheric component of an ocean but this is still far from its full extent eventually all airborne moisture must return to the earth's surface as you know rain snow hail let's just call it all precipitation if this happens over water well the cycle is complete and starts over again if the rain falls over land then water must take the scenic route back if it's lucky the rain water will meet the surface and become runoff finding its way into streams rivers lakes and eventually back to the ocean if it's unlucky the water will freeze and become part of a glacier or ice cap where it can remain stuck as part of the cryosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years that's why permanent ice is the second largest reservoir for the planet's ocean a far more common route for rain to take however is under land where it makes its way down through the soil to become groundwater the third largest reservoir on the planet here water begins the slow journey of passing through the many small perforations in the subsurface until it reaches a place to leak back out and return to the big reservoir but it's also at this point that water may enter the fourth component of the ocean if this water passes between plant roots or into the mouths of thirsty animals it becomes part of the biosphere if the water is taken up by a plant it is most likely transpired out through the leaves re-entering the atmosphere if it enters an animal well there's a lot that can happen but by the end of it all water always returns to larger reservoirs altogether on earth we call this the water cycle but for our purposes we will be calling it the moisture cycle as this is the main method by which not just water but all moisture cycles throughout a planet system so while it can't be assumed that all alien oceans will be composed of dihydrogen monoxide the features we'll find in relation to circulating moisture will remain the same no matter what chemicals are being circulated that's why when scientists look at the river channels of mars we know that some form of moisture circulation once occurred here but there's still some disagreement as to whether this was in the form of liquid water or liquid carbon dioxide all that remains of mars's water cycle is seasonal permafrost melt into groundwater though this is less of a cycle and more of a spontaneous self-contained occurrence meanwhile mars's carbon dioxide based moisture cycle is actually a little more developed as surface dry ice at the poles can sublimate directly into gas which can in turn condense out of the air into clouds and return to the surface as martian snow though mars would need a much greater atmospheric pressure approximately double that of the earth's for liquid co2 to be possible on its surface but there is one other surface ocean in our solar system that we can use to glimpse a true alien ocean next stop titan everyone's favorite moon of saturn the first thing you'll notice and really the only thing to notice is titan's incredibly thick and hazy atmosphere while it does completely obscure the surface below making it difficult to study the atmosphere is precisely why we're here in the first place all types of moisture depend on two variables temperature and pressure typically there is a narrow margin for maintaining liquidity and it's the atmosphere that provides the pressure necessary to condense gases into liquid and therefore is absolutely necessary for the formation of oceans of the only four moons in our solar system that feature any semblance of an atmosphere titan has by far the most dense and developed with pressures here exceeding even those experienced on earth this ends up making titan the most planet-like moon we know of and the most promising location to look for moisture cycles anywhere in the solar system even better the air of titan consists mainly of inert nitrogen 94 to be exact which is pretty similar to the 78 nitrogen air i'm breathing right now but the earth's atmosphere still allows us to see the surface meaning that the remaining six percent of titan's atmosphere must differ wildly from our own it's here hiding in 5.6 of the air that we'll find the first portion of titan's moisture in the form of gaseous methane as well as a wide variety of organic trace gases that have all in some way or other derived from this methane this includes ethane diacetylene methyl acetylene propane basically any carbon-based compound you could ever wish for it's this atmospheric organic stew that gives titan its distinctive haze perhaps best glimpsed by looking at the moon in eclipse where we can clearly see the reddish orange halo that blankets the surface the only problem with methane's prevalence here is that the compound actually degrades into other organics rather quickly and should have completely depleted from the air by now if not for some mechanism replenishing the methane content in the air while this mechanism may have remained a mystery and times before we figured out how to use radar to peer through this haze this is no longer a problem and just like that now we're looking at the true surface of titan it's here on the ground that we'll measure pressures of approximately 1.5 earth atmospheres and temperatures averaging negative 180 degrees celsius which we can see brings us pretty close to methane's triple point where it can easily move between states as a liquid and a gas this is why instead of featuring a hydrosphere like on earth here on titan we'll find a methanosphere while early researchers mistook this dark patch running around the moon's equator to be oceans at first methane only liquefies under extremely cold conditions relative to us anyway so while the earth struggles to keep all of its water warm enough to be liquid titan has the opposite problem and struggles keeping its methane cold enough to not be a gas so while the earth's polar regions become where water turns to ice titan's polar regions are actually the only places where methane can condense into well liquid methane is there a word for liquid methane uh looks like no okay well let me just do what every other scientist does and translate it into latin and let's see methanum methanum actually i kind of like that oceans of methanol is actually way easier to say than oceans of liquid methane all right i'm going to use it i hope everyone's okay with that and if not well get over it or just leave a mean comment or something i don't care right anyway methane's low condensation point means the methanol oceans of titan are restricted to the moon's polar regions the first of these to be discovered was seen by the cassini probe as it passed by the moon's south pole where it caught a glimpse of lacques ontario plus two much smaller lakes but because nothing not even something as big as a moon can be perfectly balanced we'll find the north pole experiences a longer summer rather counter-intuitively this means more methanol rains are distributed here from the rest of the moon this is why later flybys from the cassini probe revealed similar but far more extensive methanol bodies here unlike the shallow lacus ontario which has a maximum depth of only 7 meters these northern seas are all much deeper reaching up to 170 meters down as a result moisture patterns such as tributary networks and floodplains have become far more common and far more developed here than in the south it's across surfaces like this that methane can escape back into the atmosphere as vapor and condense into clouds while methane clouds are rare to find and even harder to spot on account of just how short-lived they are during the titan summers polar vortexes can occasionally form and rain methanol back down based on the many river systems feeding into the moon's oceans we know from here precipitation must flow across the surface back to where it came from what's less clear is whether or not this methanol also takes any of the less direct path that water might take on earth for instance does any of this liquid methane seep into the water ice crust to become part of a saturated soil layer or in other words groundwater or i mean ground methanol while subsurface aquifers almost assuredly exist in the areas immediately surrounding these lakes radar can only see past so much and just how much methane is stored in the icy soil remains a wholly unknown quantity of course the more pertinent question on most people's minds is whether or not there is any biological component to this methane cycle after all our search for alien oceans is driven by the knowledge that liquid bodies serve as the best solvents for chemicals to react through and if biology is nothing more than a series of organized chemical reactions then our best bet for finding alien biochemistry will be by looking into these alien oceans remember even life here on earth began underwater and surprisingly or perhaps unsurprisingly there have been some signs pointing towards metabolic processes taking place on titan's surface however so much remains unknown about titan that nothing more definitive can really be said about it the vast majority of our knowledge of this moon comes from just a single mission the cassini hudgens mission which ended in 2017 with cassini's plummet into saturn the next mission to launch for titan the dragonfly won't be until at the earliest 2027 with arrival at titan coming by 2036 meaning it's going to be a while before we have answers to any of these questions even still titan provides us with at least a second point of reference for what alien oceans may look like and therefore by extension the types of environments we might find alien life proliferating in what these seas and lakes show us is that oceans aren't limited to just one compound or even one set of environmental conditions where one ocean starts to freeze another can begin to condense where one ocean comes to a boil another might just start to melt our solar system can only provide us with a small snapshot of what's possible and as we continue to explore the cosmos we'll find that while ocean compositions can vary wildly from what we're familiar with they will nevertheless behave in a similar way to what we've already observed therefore all we have to do to find these liquid bodies is to know what they look like hey everyone thanks for coming along with me on this one something i didn't get to mention at all in this video is the ocean of liquid water that's most likely sitting under titan's icy crust but if that's something that you want me to touch on maybe in a future video you can head over to my patreon and help support what i do here of course subscribe to the channel and all that good stuff too thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 264,151

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, planet, ocean, titan, moon, saturn, methane, water, alien, extraterrestrial, mars, space, chemistry, biochemistry, life, astronomy, liquid, methanum, europa, gas, environment, lake

Id: hzNflE45FdM

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020