Titan's Ontario Lacus Is Like A Salt Pan

Caption: The lake known as Ontario Lacus on Titan (left) bears striking similarity to a salt pan on Earth known as the Etosha Pan (right).


Lately, I've become interested, once again, in the state of science regarding Saturn's moon, Titan. (I saw a TV special on Titan recently that fired up my curiosity again.)

One surprising result of the Huygens mission was that Titan appeared to be 'drier' (less hydrocarbon liquid on the surface) than people expected. People made analogies between Titan and desert areas like Arizona. The evidence for liquids was everywhere to be seen, but the liquids themselves were not in immediate sight.

Here is another result in the same vein. We have salt pans in the Southwest too. Searles Lake in the Mojave Desert, near China Lake, would be a close analogy:

A new study analyzing data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggests that the lake, known as Ontario Lacus, behaves most similarly to what we call a salt pan on Earth.

A group led by Thomas Cornet of the Université de Nantes, France, a Cassini associate, found evidence for long-standing channels etched into the lake bed within the southern boundary of the depression. This suggests that Ontario Lacus, previously thought to be completely filled with liquid hydrocarbons, could actually be a depression that drains and refills from below, exposing liquid areas ringed by materials like saturated sand or mudflats.

...These characteristics make Ontario Lacus very similar to the Etosha salt pan on Earth, which is a lake bed that fills with a shallow layer of water from groundwater levels that rise during the rainy season. This layer then evaporates and leaves sediments like tide marks showing the previous extent of the water.

...While the liquid on Titan is methane, ethane and propane rather than water, the cycle appears to work in a very similar fashion to the water cycle on Earth. Beyond Earth, Titan is the only other world known to bear stable liquids on its surface.