MNHM Annual Meeting
May 16 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Marion Natural History Museum’s Annual Meeting featuring Chris German of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will give a talk on “From Submarine Vents to Life on other Ocean Worlds” on May 16 from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm.
The first Alvin dives to submarine vents, together with the discovery that they hosted new species of animals never seen before on Earth, was hailed as one of the top scientific discoveries of the entire 20th Century. But what was not yet known, as the millennium turned, was that Earth is not the only planetary body in our solar system that has deep saltwater oceans. In the past ~25 years it has become apparent that there may be as many as 20 such “ocean worlds” among the moons of the Giant Planets that orbit beyond our Solar System’s “snow line”: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune & Uranus. While the outer pair have not been revisited since the Voyager expeditions of the 1970s-80s, NASA’s Galileo and Cassini missions to the Jupiter and Saturn systems, respectively, have revealed the presence of a number of ice-covered moons, similar in size to Earth’s moons, but with salt-water oceans underneath. In the case of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, careful study has revealed that those oceans are in contact with an underlying rocky seafloor. Exactly the kind of setting that could host submarine venting of a kind that could host microbial life at the base of a food chain that is independent of sunlight – just like Earth’s submarine vents.
In this talk Chris will share some of the insights from WHOI scientists that are helping shape NASA’s strategies to explore for life in future space missions to icy moons – including the Europa Clipper mission, just launched in October 2024 – and how engineering at WHOI is helping to develop technologies that will be needed to explore further, using audacious, robotics-led approaches to gain access to, and explore within, their underlying oceans.
The event is free however we ask that you register online at the museum’s website: www.marionmuseum.org.