Scientific Colloquium
October 29, 2010


"Lava Lakes on Io and Earth – The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of the Jovian System?"

A persistent lava lake is the top of a column of magma connected to a deep-seated reservoir.  As such, they are windows into the interior of the Earth.  Rare on Earth, lava lakes of immense size are found on the volcanically active jovian moon Io.   Io’s eruptions exhibit a wide range of effusive and explosive styles and dwarf their contemporaries on Earth by any measurable standard.  Io is caught in a gravitational tug-of-war that includes Jupiter, Europa and Ganymede, and tidal heating leads to the high level of volcanic activity.  Tidal heating is most exaggerated at Io, so this is the best place to study this process.  The best way to constrain interior structure is to measure the eruption temperature of the dominant silicates, which immediately applies constraints on the degree of interior melting and dissipation within Io.  One of the best places to make this crucial measurement is at an active lava lake.  Ashley Davies has traveled to the most extreme environments on Earth to better understand how lava lakes work, model the processes taking place and to design observations for future missions to Io.  Constraining Io’s interior state will help us understand the interior state of neighbouring moon Europa, the proposed target of NASA’s next large mission to the outer Solar System. 

Ashley Davies, Ph.D. is a Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, CA, and is an expert in the remote sensing of volcanic activity.  He obtained a Ph.D in volcanology from Lancaster University, UK, in 1988.  He joined JPL in 1994 as a Post-Doctoral Associate, and as a full-time Scientist in 1996.  He was a member of the Galileo Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer Team, and is Principal Investigator on several studies investigating volcanic activity on Io and Earth.  He was a recipient of the 2005 NASA Software of the Year Award for his work on spacecraft autonomy, and is the author of “Volcanism on Io – a Comparison with Earth”, the definitive guide to Io’s volcanoes.


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