Related papers: A pole-to-equator ocean overturning circulation on…
Ice-rich planets are formed exterior to the water ice-line and thus are expected to contain a substantial amount of ices. The high ice content leads to unique conditions in the interior, under which the structure of a planet is affected by…
Ocean heat transport on icy moons shapes the ice shell topography, a primary observable of these moons. Two key processes control the heat transport: baroclinic instability driven by surface buoyancy contrasts and convective instability…
Enceladus, a small icy moon of Saturn, is one of the most remarkable bodies in the solar system. This moon is a geologically active object, and despite the lower temperatures on most of its surface, the geothermally heated south polar…
The ice shell on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, exhibits strong asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres, with all known geysers concentrated over the south pole, even though the expected pattern of tidal-rotational…
In order to understand the climate on terrestrial planets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars, one would like to know their thermal inertia. We use a global climate model to simulate the thermal phase variations of Earth-analogs and test whether…
In the outer envelope of the Sun and in other stars, differential rotation and meridional circulation are maintained via the redistribution of momentum and energy by convective motions. In order to properly capture such processes in a…
The Southern Ocean plays an integral role in the global climate system, exchanging heat, salt, and carbon throughout the major ocean basins via the deep, fast-flowing Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is…
The meridional temperature profile of the upper layers of planetary atmospheres is set through a balance between differential radiative heating by a nearby star, or by intrinsic heat fluxes emanating from the deep interior, and the…
Like elsewhere in the deep-sea, life in the deep Mediterranean depends on turbulent exchange across the stable vertical density stratification for supply of nutrients and oxygen. Commonly modelled, turbulent exchange is inversely…
Recent studies have shown that ocean dynamics can have a significant warming effect on the permanent night sides of 1 to 1 tidally locked terrestrial exoplanets with Earth-like atmospheres and oceans in the middle of the habitable zone.…
In this work we generalize the notion of convective inhibition to apply in cases where there is an infinite reservoir of condensible species (i.e., an ocean). We propose a new model for the internal structure and thermal evolution of…
Planets with high obliquity receive more radiation in the polar regions than at low latitudes, and thus, assuming an ocean-covered surface with sufficiently high heat capacity, their meridional temperature gradient was shown to be reversed…
Europa's icy surface likely overlies an ocean, but the ice thickness is not known. Here we model the temporal growth of a Europan shell of pure ice subject to varying ice-ocean heat fluxes, ice rheologies, and internal heating rates. Both…
We have developed a homogeneous model of physical chemistry to investigate the neutral-dominated, water-based Enceladus torus. Electrons are treated as the summation of two isotropic Maxwellian distributions$-$a thermal component and a hot…
Convection is a fundamental physical process in the fluid cores of planets because it is the primary transport mechanism for heat and chemical species and the primary energy source for planetary magnetic fields. Key properties of…
The Hadley circulation describes a planetary-scale tropical atmospheric flow, which has a major influence on climate. Contemporary theoretical understanding is based upon angular momentum conservation, the basic dynamical constraint…
The interiors of many planets consist mostly of fluid layers. When these layers are subject to superadiabatic temperature or compositional gradients, turbulent convection transports heat and momentum. In addition, planets are fast rotators.…
Active eruptions from the south polar region of Saturn's small (~500 km diameter) moon Enceladus are concentrated along a series of lineaments known as the `tiger stripes', thought to be partially open fissures that connect to the liquid…
Many extrasolar (bound) terrestrial planets and free-floating (unbound) planets have been discovered. The existence of bound and unbound terrestrial planets with liquid water is an important question, and of particular importance is the…
We use a linear shallow-water model to investigate the global circulation of the atmospheres of tidally locked planets. Simulations, observations, and simple models show that if these planets are sufficiently rapidly rotating, their…