Project Description
About the Project
Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is one of the most compelling targets for planetary science and astrobiology. Its young surface is crisscrossed by bands, ridges, pits, domes and chaos terrains, features that suggest an active ice shell undergoing processes potentially similar to plate-like tectonics on Earth (Sullivan et al., 1998; Tufts et al., 2000; Kattenhorn & Prockter, 2014). This suggests that cryovolcanism – i.e., the ascent and eruption of briny water or ice melts – might play a central role in resurfacing Europa, contributing to the exchange of oxidants and reductants between surface and ocean, and sustaining potential habitability (Vance, 2018; Soderlund et al., 2020).
Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the origins of cryovolcanism on Europa. One possibility is that brittle ice at the surface is recycled downwards into the warmer, ductile, convecting ice deeper in the shell. This might warm the recycled ice locally to form mushy or briny layers. Another possibility is that salt segregation during solidification forms brine lenses that persist and destabilise, driving the formation of chaos terrains or transient flows (Buffo et al., 2021). Ocean heat may also promote melting at the base of the ice shell, though turbulent heat loss and rapid refreezing appear to limit direct material exchange with the ocean below, favouring in-situ melting instead (Soderlund et al., 2020; Ojha et al., 2026). Together these pathways are further influenced by tidal heating (Tobie et al., 2025) and the complex thermophysical properties of ice-brine mixtures.
While each mechanism has been studied individually, few studies consider how they interact. This project builds an integrated framework to weigh their relative contributions and predict what each would produce at the surface, addressing four questions:
1. Under what conditions can recycled material in the shell warm-up and contribute to cryovolcanic activity?
2. How do mushy-layer physics and salt segregation promote the formation, persistence, and destabilisation of brine-rich zones?
3. To what extent can boundary conditions derived from ocean circulation models influence ice shell convection and melting dynamics?
4. What would each mechanism look like at the surface, and are these predictions consistent with existing Galileo-era imagery?
By combining tectonics, brine dynamics, and ice-ocean boundary interactions within one modelling framework, this project will investigate the drivers and style of cryovolcanism on Europa with the same brine-transport and basal-melting physics feeding directly back into how these processes are understood in Earth’s own ice shelves and sea ice.
For more details see the full project description
Funding Information
Funding Notes
Full funded competition based opportunity through the IAPETUS DTP.
For academic year 26/27 the studentships will be £21 805.
Eligibility Requirements
Eligibility:
IAPETUS studentships are open to both UK and international applicants. Applicants would normally be expected to hold a first-class or upper second-class (2:1) undergraduate degree, or have equivalent relevant experience, and a Master’s degree is not required.
For international applicants, endorsement from the prospective primary supervisor is required before submitting an application, with a deadline of **7 December 2026** for this.
Application Process
How to Apply: Please refer to the following website for details on how to apply: https://iapetus.ac.uk/how-to-apply/
