The surface of Titan. Simulations by MIT geologists indicate that the lakes and seas on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, are shaped by wave-driven erosion. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The lakes of Titan. Saturn’s largest moon, hosts active rivers, lakes, and seas, likely shaped by waves according to MIT researchers who used simulations to study the erosion of Titan’s shorelines. Credit: NASAThe MIT team took a different approach to investigate the presence of waves on Titan, by first modeling the ways in which a lake can erode on Earth. They then applied their modeling to Titan’s seas to determine what form of erosion could have produced the shorelines in Cassini’s images.
Perron and his colleagues, including first author Rose Palermo, a former MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student and a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, will publish their study in a forthcoming issue of. Their co-authors include MIT research scientist Jason Soderblom, former MIT postdoc Sam Birch, now an assistant professor at Brown University, Andrew Ashton at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Alexander Hayes of Cornell University.
The researchers simulated how various shoreline shapes would evolve under each of the three scenarios. To simulate wave-driven erosion, they took into account a variable known as “fetch,” which describes the physical distance from one point on a shoreline to the opposite side of a lake or sea.
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