Jun 222016
 

Seems Yuggoth might have a Deep One colony. Maybe under Cthulhu Regio?

Pluto’s Subsurface Ocean May Likely Exist Today

“Our model shows that recent geological activity on Pluto can be driven just from phase changes in the ice – no tides or exotic materials or unusual processes are required.  If Pluto’s most recent tectonic episode is extensional, that means that Pluto may have an ocean at present.  This lends support to the idea that oceans may be common among large Kuiper Belt objects, just as they are common among the satellites of the outer planets,” said Barr, who helped formulate the numerical model and interpret the results.

Pluto wouldn’t have the sort of tidal forces that a place like Europa has, nor solar energy bombardment on the level of a place like Earth. So you wouldn’t think there’d be the chance for liquid water. But the possibility of a warm Plutonian core exists, driven by radioactive decay and residual heat from formation (though not *much* of a chance, given how small the place is, not a whole lot bigger than Luna). This new study suggests that the visible surface features aren’t those that would be expected if the planetary water ocean was wholly frozen, but instead resembled the features to be expected of a thick layer of water ice atop a still-liquid ocean. The difference is Ice-II: if you take regular ice (“Ice-I”) and subject it to Pluto-level cryogenic cold *and* put it under the sort of pressure it would experience under miles of ice, it undergoes a crystalline structural change into a  25% denser form, something like how graphite turns to diamond under pressure. If the deeply buried ice were to transform like that, the surface features would reflect the fact that the deep subsurface was contracting.

 Posted by at 3:37 pm