The heat inside icy moons like Europa might be trapped at the bottom of the ocean by 'underwater weather' instead of melting the ice.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
A Tug-of-War Between Baroclinic Eddies and Convection: Implications for Icy Moon Oceans
arXiv · 2603.17185
The Takeaway
It is often assumed that geothermal heat from an icy moon's core would rise and melt the ice shell, but this study shows that horizontal eddies—deep-sea storms—can act as a barrier. This determines whether life-friendly warm zones reach the surface or stay locked away in the deep ocean.
From the abstract
In many geophysical and planetary environments, such as Earth's ocean and atmosphere as well as subsurface oceans of icy satellites, convection driven by bottom geothermal heating usually coexists with baroclinic eddies driven by lateral buoyancy/temperature gradients. These processes compete against each other, with convection destabilizing the stratification and baroclinic eddies re-stabilizing it, thereby controlling whether the bottom heat flux is significantly redistributed as it is transmi