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Dynamic habitability: From mid-ocean ridges to Europa

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Dynamic habitability is the evolving habitability of a system, e.g. Venus might not be habitable now but might have been in the past or even in the future. The essential components of life are a solvent, the right chemistry (i.e. CHNOPS), energy that can be taken advantage of and a suitable environment. In this talk, I will attempt to look at dynamic habitability from the perspective of Earth all the way to the Jovian moon, Europa. Uniquely on Earth, plate tectonics is intricately linked to the habitability of our blue planet. Therefore, I embark on a journey to understand plate tectonics from a modeling perspective. First, I will show that mid-ocean ridges, which is a candidate location for the origin of life on Earth, have remained at the optimal depths for hydrothermal circulation over time. Next, I will explore melt transport beneath mid-ocean ridge settings, where there are crucial exchanges between the Earth’s interior and the surface. This melt transport has implications for seafloor morphology and the structure and composition of the oceanic lithosphere which forms the bulk of tectonic plates. Moving to subduction zones where the crust is recycled back into the mantle, I will show how fluids and geochemical composition affect the mass fluxes through foundering by using reactive thermodynamics on the lower continental crust in a state of disequilibrium. Life takes advantage of disequilibrium so in order to understand habitability, we need to be able to couple reactive thermodynamics together fluid transport in many systems. Going to one of our nearest planetary body Mars, I use a combination of two-phase flow principles and planetary thermal evolution to model volatile trapping in the early Mars magma ocean to show that there are potentially more volatiles trapped in the Martian interior than previously thought. Water is one of the major components of habitability. To understand the dynamic habitability of Mars, I show how the distribution of water in the various reservoirs can evolve over time. I will end the talk by discussing future work on understanding dynamic habitability on Europa and other habitable worlds.

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:cos-smanandhar8
  • Created:11/09/2023
  • Modified By:cos-smanandhar8
  • Modified:11/10/2023

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