Understanding the volcanic moon’s history could offer fresh insights into conditions on early Earth. Understanding the volcanic moon’s history could offer fresh insights into conditions on early Earth.
Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser . In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.Jupiter’s moon Io has been continuously shaped by volcanic activity for billions of years — possibly even for the Solar System’s entire 4.57-billion-year history, a study suggests.
Throughout the Solar System, the ratio between two sulfur isotopes — sulfur-32 and the slightly heavier sulfur-34 — is relatively constant, says de Kleer. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a radio telescope in Chile, she and her and colleagues measured sulfur emissions in Io’s atmosphere and calculated the ratio between the two isotopes.
Their observations revealed that Io has lost 94–99% of its originally available sulfur. At the top of its atmosphere, the ratio of sulfur isotopes is slightly skewed towards the lighter variant, and these gases rich in sulfur-32 are “being stripped off the top of the atmosphere at a loss of about one tonne per second”, de Kleer says. Over billions of years, this discrepancy has accumulated, and Io’s overall sulfur composition has become heavier.
The very hot, runny lava on Io is much hotter than what found on Earth now, “but it’s thought to be the composition of magma that dominated in Earth’s early history, when we had these huge events laying down big regions of lava flows in a short period of time”, says de Kleer. “Io’s volcanism might be giving us a window into the mechanisms of volcanism and Earth’s early history.”
Jani Radebaugh, a planetary geologist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, welcomes the findings. “That Io could be even more exciting — even more extreme — in its volcanism is mind-blowing,” she says. “The results reveal that further exploration of Io would help us uncover the unknown histories of other volcanic worlds, including our own planet.
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