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Titan: Rain in the desert

The "rainy season" extends to lower latitudes.

Titan manifests, once we go through the dense fog, a world seemingly divided into two seemingly polar regions ... a "wet", where there are large lakes and the clear signals of the flow of liquid methane, and an equatorial reminiscent of the great desert land, with vast fields of dunes extending thousands of miles. It is the latter, a region that appears to be behind in the evolution of this world, where the activity is gradually pulled toward higher latitudes. Fully

? Maybe not, as now seems to indicate the data from Cassini, which led to a team led by Elizabeth Turtle, of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to publish a new study indicates that there is clear evidence that severe storms are occurring not just in common areas, but in low latitudes that until now were thought to be outside any . Now, signs of fluvial erosion, which is believed remnants of the past simple can be much more present and active than expected.

The change of seasons is living Titan and the Cassini , thanks to its remained in the Saturn system for seven years, is watching live opens the doors to this new vision of climate this moon where large cloud systems appear to be extending to very low latitudes and leaving behind apparent signs that heavy rains are changing the field, as explained by Elizabeth Turtle: " The changes are more consistent with the presence of widespread rains of methane, suggesting that the low-latitude dry channels are carved by seasonal rainfall . "

Turtle and his team reported sudden drops in brightness of equatorial areas where large formations passing storm, a darkening which most likely explanation that best explains are heavy rains of methane. And while there are other possibilities, such as storms or volcanic dust, the truth is that they are nowhere near as satisfactory.

We are not talking about specific phenomena and low-intensity, since the affected areas have a combined area of \u200b\u200b500,000 square kilometers, that is, more or less the equivalent to the entire state of California or Spain. Titan certainly seems to be far from a silent world, frozen in time, even those that looked like desert areas where the processes gained by mastering the high latitudes had been extinct for millions of years.

Titan's atmospheric circulation and Earth has similarities but also big difference ... so, while on Earth most of the rainfall occurs in the so-called intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), ie, in Ecuador, with other weaker bands of precipitation North and South, on Titan the ITCZ \u200b\u200bmoves from one pole to another following the change of seasons. On Earth, this shift is much more limited.

cloud formations at high latitudes, near one of the lakes of methane (the dark spot in the top left) .. when Cassini arrived they still focused on this area of \u200b\u200bthe North, but now this seems to be changing.

Titan's Torrents of Spring Showers Bring Methane, Maintain 'Dry' Gullies