Honolulu Civil Beat reporter, Denby Fawcett, recently published a story highlighting the 2014 pioneering publication led by John Sinton, emeritus professor of Earth Sciences at SOEST, that revealed Ka‘ena Volcano as the precursor volcano of the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. Excerpts from the story are below.

“My purpose here is to describe and honor the long-lost third volcano that scientists named Kaena — at one time a massive shield volcano, the first to form Oahu.

Why focus on a precursor volcano that’s now submerged thousands of feet under the sea? One reason is that Kaena is still largely unknown to the general public. And if you ask, who cares, I contend it is just as interesting to know about the earth we are standing on as to be aware of what towers above us.

According to the findings of the scientific team led by University of Hawaii geologist John Sinton, the volcano Kaena erupted off today’s Kaena Point about 5 million years ago, making it the oldest volcano responsible for the creation of Oahu.

Sinton says at one point in Oahu’s geologic history all three volcanoes stood together high above sea level. Kaena, the shortest of the trio, rose about 3,000 feet.

All that remains of Kaena volcano today is a long ridge under the sea, extending westward from Kaena Point with half of the underwater ridge covered by younger lavas from the Waianae volcano. The original extent of Kaena is not known, but it must have extended to the south at least as far as present day Waianae Valley. The sheer size of Kaena’s remnants suggest Oahu once was about two times larger than it is today.

[SOEST] Geologist Scott Rowland says the fact that we can no longer see Kaena volcano, whose summit is now almost 2,600 feet below the sea, would help explain why this Oahu first-born volcano is still off the radar of most of us today.

[The] team from the UH collaborated on the project with Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de L’Environment (France), and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. UH researchers on the Kaena expeditions included Deborah Eason, Mary Tardona, Douglas Pyle and Iris van der Zander.

Sinton says he looks forward to more research on Kaena Ridge using the latest high-resolution techniques, especially to better understand samples gathered from neighboring Waialu Ridge but not yet dated.

In the 2014 paper, Sinton and his co-authors describe Waialu Ridge as a part of Kaena volcano, not a separate magma producing structure — but maybe it isn’t, says Sinton.

Maybe Waialu is another volcano, a fourth volcano that was situated between Kaena and Waianae volcanoes.

Just when we think we know everything, we don’t. That is the beauty of science.”

Read the full story on Civil Beat.

In an article recently published in the journal Eos, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa graduate student Diamond Tachera outlines a powerful approach to increase equity and inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and communities in science—reframing funding strategies. Born and raised on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, Tachera’s insights have been gained during her academic and personal journey as a kanaka scientist in the geosciences.

“In general, today’s Western scientific establishment devalues work done by Indigenous community members who assist academic researchers and relationships built by Indigenous scientists with local communities,” said Tachera, who is an Earth Sciences doctoral student in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). “Together with other extractive behaviors, this devaluation erodes trust among Indigenous Peoples toward Western scientific traditions.”

UH Mānoa science faculty and students are engaged in a variety of grassroots efforts to improve representation and reciprocity in science research and education, such as UH cohorts’ participation in Unlearning Racism in Geoscience and a newly developed curriculum, Kūlana Noiʻi that outlines best practices and guiding questions regarding respect, reciprocity, self-awareness, community engagement, knowledge ownership and access, and accountability. 

However, if change is to happen at a larger scale in the sciences, Tachera suggests broader scale change is required.

“Changing funding structures is one powerful way to develop reciprocity and respect and repair relationships,” said Tachera. “I call for changes in research funding systems so they value equitable relationships with communities; acknowledge, in the grant process, the kuleana and timelines required to build relationships and pursue research and broader impacts in Indigenous communities; and enforce accountability from the highest levels within academics to encourage best practices as common practices in research.”

Many funding agencies require scientists to include activities that broaden the impact of their research. Often, these broader impacts involve sharing findings with community members. Tachera suggests these efforts should consider community practices and more effectively meet the needs of community members.  

“Our academic and funding systems have a real opportunity to improve,” said Tachera. “By shifting their structure, they can better value relationship building and broader impacts on communities by ensuring that funding timelines realistically reflect the needs of the relationship-building process and provide support for Indigenous communities who provide unpaid labor to the scientific community.”

Without this accountability, Tachera cautions, scientists will build animosity and mistrust, rather than the equitable relationships that are necessary for effective and ethical work with communities. “Updating funding systems is just one step toward greater inclusion and accountability across all levels of academia and will result in science that is mutually beneficial to, and respectful of, everyone involved,” said Tachera.

Read also on UH News.

One of the youngest planets ever found around a distant infant star has been discovered by an international team of scientists led by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa faculty, students, and alumni. 

Thousands of planets have been discovered around other stars, but what sets this one apart is that it is newly-formed and can be directly observed. The planet, named 2M0437b, joins a handful of objects advancing our understanding of how planets form and change with time, helping shed new light on the origin of the Solar System and Earth. The in-depth research was recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

“This serendipitous discovery adds to an elite list of planets that we can directly observe with our telescopes,” explained lead author Eric Gaidos, a professor in the UH Mānoa Department of Earth Sciences. “By analyzing the light from this planet we can say something about its composition, and perhaps where and how it formed in a long-vanished disk of gas and dust around its host star.”  

The researchers estimate that the planet is a few times more massive than Jupiter, and that it formed with its star several million years ago, around the time the main Hawaiian Islands first emerged above the ocean. The planet is so young that it is still hot from the energy released during its formation, with a temperature similar to the lava erupting from Kīlauea Volcano.

Key Maunakea telescopes 

In 2018, 2M0437b was first seen with the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea by UH Institute for Astronomy (IfA) visiting researcher Teruyuki Hirano. For the past several years, it has been studied carefully utilizing other telescopes on the mauna. 

Gaidos and his collaborators used the Keck Observatory on Maunakea to monitor the position of the host star as it moved across the sky, confirming that planet 2M0437b was truly a companion to the star, and not a more distant object. The observations required three years because the star moves slowly across the sky. 

The planet and its parent star lie in a stellar “nursery” called the Taurus Cloud. 2M0437b is on a much wider orbit than the planets in the Solar System; its current separation is about one hundred times the Earth-Sun distance, making it easier to observe. However, sophisticated “adaptive” optics are still needed to compensate for the image distortion caused by Earth’s atmosphere.  

“Two of the world’s largest telescopes, adaptive optics technology and Maunakea’s clear skies were all needed to make this discovery,” said co-author Michael Liu, an astronomer at IfA. “We are all looking forward to more such discoveries, and more detailed studies of such planets with the technologies and telescopes of the future.”

Future research potential 

Gathering more in-depth research about the newly-discovered planet may not be too far away. “Observations with space telescopes such as NASA’s Hubble and the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope could identify gases in its atmosphere and reveal whether the planet has a moon-forming disk,” Gaidos added.    

The star that 2M0437b orbits is too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, but currently from Hawaiʻi, the young planet and other infant stars in the Taurus Cloud are almost directly overhead in the pre-dawn hours, north of the bright star Hokuʻula (Aldeberan) and east of the Makaliʻi (Pleiades) star cluster.

Contributors to this research include several UH graduate students and alumni: Rena Lee (Earth Science graduate student), Maïssa Salama (IfA graduate student), and IfA alumni Zhoujian Zhang, Travis Berger, Sam Grunblatt and Megan Ansdell.  

Read also on Forbes, CBS News, Newsweek, Independent, Hawaii Tribune-Herald, KITV4, UH News, Eurkealert, Hawaii News Now, Maui Now and Yahoo! News.

A study co-authored by School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology scientists suggests that Mylodon—a ground sloth that lived in South America until about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago—was not a strict vegetarian like all of its living relatives. Based on a chemical analysis of amino acids preserved in sloth hair, the researchers uncovered evidence that this gigantic extinct sloth was an omnivore, at times eating meat or other animal protein in addition to plant matter.

Led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History and published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study contradicts previous assumptions about the animal.

Even though the six living sloth species all are relatively small plant-eating tree-dwellers restricted to tropical forests of Central and South America, hundreds of fossil sloth species, some as large as an elephant, roamed ancient landscapes from Alaska to the southern tip of South America. Mylodon darwinii, also known as “Darwin’s ground sloth,” is thought to have weighed between 2,200 and 4,400 pounds and was nearly 10 feet long.

Based on dental characteristics, jaw biomechanics, preserved excrement from some very recent fossil species, and the fact that all living sloths exclusively eat plants, Mylodon and its extinct relatives have long been presumed to be herbivores as well. But these factors could not directly reveal whether an animal might have ingested food that requires little or no preparation and is completely digested, as happens in carcass scavenging or some other kinds of meat-eating.

To get a more complete picture, the new study used an innovative technique at the Biogeochemical Stable Isotope Facility in the SOEST Department of Earth Sciences. Lab director Brian Popp and lab manager Natalie Wallsgrove led efforts to assess nitrogen isotopes locked into specific amino acids within animal body parts.

Found in different proportions in the food consumed by an animal, stable nitrogen isotopes are also preserved in their body tissues—including hair and other keratinous tissues like fingernails, as well as in collagen like that found in teeth or bones. By first analyzing the amino-acid nitrogen values in a wide range of modern herbivores and omnivores to determine a clear signal of eating a mix of plant and animal food, fossils can then be measured to determine the food they consumed.

“This offers scientists—including biologists and oceanographers—a unique window into the diets of animals, whether they live on land or in the ocean,” said Popp. “These analyses allow us to determine whether an animal was an herbivore, omnivore, carnivore, or a specialized marine animal consumer,” said Popp.

The researchers used samples from seven living and extinct species of sloths and anteaters (which are closely related to sloths), as well as from a wide range of modern omnivores, from the scientific collections of the Museum’s Mammalogy and Paleontology Departments and from the Yale Peabody Museum.

“It was exciting to work with these samples, as our laboratory had never analyzed any sort of sloth tissue prior to this study,” said Wallsgrove.

Prior research speculated that there were more herbivores than could be supported by the available plants in ancient ecosystems of South America, suggesting that some of those herbivores may have been finding other sources of food. This new study provides compelling evidence supporting that previously untested idea.

“These results, providing the first direct evidence of omnivory in an ancient sloth species, demands reevaluation of the entire ecological structure of ancient mammalian communities in South America, as sloths represented a major component of these ecosystems across the past 34 million years,” said lead author Julia Tejada, a Museum research associate and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montpellier, France.

Content courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

Read more on UH News.

Hohonu, Inc, a University of Hawai‘i (UH) technology startup that provides environmental water level monitoring to help communities adapt to climate change, is part of a team selected as one of four participants to expand its water level observing network in the Southeast US region. The four teams are working with the Southeast Coastal and Ocean Observing Regional Association (SECOORA) which is a member of the US Integrated Ocean Observing System, and part of NOAA.

SECOORA created the five-year project to help coastal managers plan for, manage, and adapt to community flooding. As part of the project, Hohonu has partnered with non-profit American Shore and Beach Preservation Association (ASBPA) and 54 communities to install water-level sensors that are deployed to areas between federal tide station assets to provide local water level observations and predictions to coastal communities.

“Our goal is to empower communities with data, and ultimately to transform how data is used to help communities adapt to climate change,” said Brian Glazer, Hohonu CEO and co-founder and oceanography associate professor at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. 

More intense storms and frequent nuisance flooding has motivated communities across the southeast to develop prioritized sea level rise adaptation plans. Community-level data granularity will provide numerous economic benefits to local coastal communities that are presently brought to a full stand still when flooding shuts down critical infrastructure and transportation corridors.

“Hohonu’s data has become a source of knowledge that impacts how we manage our day-to-day operations as well as how we respond to extreme events like storms,” said Lucas Hernandez, Resilience Specialist at Kiawah Island, South Carolina. “Their network of sensors throughout the region paints an environmental picture we did not have before.”

Designing technology to fill a need

Hohonu’s mission is rooted in applying scientific environmental technology to help underserved communities. The company was incorporated in 2019, but its origin dates back to 2014 when Glazer, became frustrated with the lack of environmental monitoring tools that were available to him while helping to restore an 800-year old Hawaiian fishpond.

Glazer teamed up with engineer Stanley Lio to develop groundbreaking, low-cost water level sensors that provide unprecedented insight on tides, floods, and sea level rise. Glazer has received previous funding from the National Science Foundation and Schmidt Marine Tech Partners to commercialize Hohonu. To him, hardware is only part of the solution.

“Democratizing access to ocean-observing technologies has always been my driving motivation,” Glazer stated. “And in order to deploy low-cost electronics, you need to invest heavily into the knowledge and software infrastructure to support those devices.”

Expanding community observations

Years of experience has now made it routine for Hohonu’s team to deploy these devices, which typically are installed on bridges, piers, or docks. Now, the company is seeking to expand its services to the rest of the nation.

“Anywhere in the US, Hohonu can now collect water data within a matter of days, at a fraction of the cost, and without requiring a team of installation technicians. We’re excited to bring this service to all communities who need it,” said Glazer.

Read more on SECOORA News.

One woman’s love for the Pacific Ocean will soon mean opportunities for women studying oceanography at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa.

Fran Friend Alexander’s love for the ocean has taken her all over the Pacific, including Hawaiʻi, where she and her husband vacationed for the past 20 years.

It’s a connection that runs so deep that she has endowed a scholarship for women students pursuing graduate degrees in oceanography at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

The FranZina Friend Alexander and Kirk Alexander Love the Pacific Ocean Scholarship is for graduate students who are active members of Women in SOEST who are passionate about the Pacific Ocean and want to study it and its inhabitants.

“We’re just really in love with the ocean but the Pacific is our heart, and I want to save it because it’s in trouble,” she says. “I want my great nieces and nephews, who are all under 5, to be able to experience seeing fish.”

When she decided to establish a legacy, Fran chose the University of Hawaiʻi’s oceanography program after speaking with Dr. Margaret McManus, the oceanography department chair at SOEST.

“I want to encourage women into the sciences and into the ocean,” Fran says.

Dr. McManus says graduate students in oceanography typically receive financial aid through federal grants or contracts secured by their faculty advisors or from teaching assistantships. Of the 60 graduate students enrolled in the current school year, only 10 have teaching assistantships; the rest are dependent on their advisors’ grants. There are only a handful of scholarships.

“The limiting factor that we’re seeing in admitting students is the funding,” she says. “We often have many more qualified people than we can admit because we want them to be funded.”

A life on the ocean

Fran’s career didn’t take her to the ocean. She and her husband, Kirk Alexander, live on the other side of the Pacific, in Seattle, where she owned a computer store for a while in the 1980’s before getting into the trade show business.

When she met her husband, he was an active sailor, racing as many as six nights per week. He is now retired from Boeing Co., but recently returned to work on a short-term contract. For years they owned a 36-foot sailboat and would take trips to sail north to Canada.

Their annual trips to Hawaiʻi started after a friend from her Texas high school moved to Honolulu. The couple would stop on Oahu to visit her friend, Jeannie, before heading to their timeshare on Kauai.

They are hoping to travel next to a number of islands in the South Pacific, including Fakarava Atoll in French Polynesia, where the coral reef is vibrant and alive.

“The snorkeling there is unbelievable,” she says, adding that she hopes her gift will also support the study of how climate change affects the ocean.

It will — Dr. McManus says the oceanography faculty has a major research component that focuses on climate change.

Fran fears any damage to the reefs and the ocean will only be worse after she is gone.

“By then we’ll not only have passed the point of no return but everything is going to be different,” she says. “We’re going to need lots of scientists to cope with this and that’s a driving factor for my gift. Also, if we’re going to fix the world, we need women to do it.”

Meanwhile, Fran has been busy with another project related to the ocean — organizing, identifying and cataloging a large collection of seashells amassed over the years by herself, her mother and her in-laws. Once she’s done, she plans to give the collection to the University of Hawaiʻi’s oceanography department, where Dr. Doug Luther will keep them in his collection.

Dr. McManus says it’s been rewarding to help Fran Friend Alexander achieve her dream. “She’s just wonderful – I just feel so grateful that we met and that we are able to do something to help her vision and that so many students will benefit from her gift,” she says. “I just feel deep, deep gratitude for her and I know our students will too.”

Story by Janis Magin, UH Foundation News

Changes in ocean physics, chemistry, and biology are occurring in response to human activities.  University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa oceanographer Seth Bushinsky recently received an infusion of support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to use satellites and ocean floats to gain new insights into the global ocean.

Through four grants totaling over $2.7 million Bushinsky, assistant professor in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, and collaborators will bring together existing ocean observation data from around the world and make new measurements to understand critical carbon cycle processes in the North Pacific and Southern Oceans. Together, these diverse efforts will offer a big picture of global ocean dynamics and a deep dive—literally and scientifically—into the complex interplay of biology, physics and chemistry in the two study locations.

“Understanding the mechanisms that determine when and how the ocean takes up carbon and oxygen from the atmosphere is important to our fundamental knowledge of ocean biogeochemistry and to our ability to model future climate,” said Bushinsky.

Making global data accessible, standard

A worldwide array of Argo profiling floats carries multiple sensors to measure changes in temperature, oxygen, nitrate, carbon and acidification throughout the ocean–from surface to the deep.

“Although this network of floats enables global monitoring of the oceans, there are no unified float datasets that integrate all observations,” said Bushinsky. “Our NOAA-funded project will assess and adjust observations from the international Argo float database to produce an internally consistent global database. Beyond our immediate interests in changes to ocean oxygen and carbon, this tool will be invaluable to climate monitoring and modeling communities, for example, or to ecosystem modelers interested in ocean health and fisheries management.”

North Pacific deep dive

With funding from NSF, Bushinsky and co-investigators will deploy five new Argo floats in an area of the western North Pacific Ocean called the Kuroshio Extension, where there is significant carbon dioxide uptake. New data gathered will fill a void of observations and enable researchers to link the formation of interior water to changes in carbon dioxide and oxygen, greatly advancing understanding the drivers of these changes.

“We will use these observations to both calculate the drivers of air-sea carbon dioxide and oxygen fluxes, to validate computer model projections and to link the observed mechanisms to longer-term variability and climate processes,” added Bushinsky.

Southern Ocean deep dive

The Southern Ocean is a critically important component of the global climate system that constitutes the largest oceanic sink for human-produced carbon and heat.

“In order to understand the global carbon cycle and how the uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide will change in future, one of the most important issues is to understand contemporary ocean carbon uptake and storage,” said Bushinsky. “Our understanding of the processes governing the Southern Ocean’s role in the carbon cycle has been hampered by limited wintertime observations,” said Bushinsky.

New funding from NASA will support Bushinsky and co-investigators to assess data from newly available profiling floats in the Southern Ocean, satellite observations, and model simulations to improve understanding of the mechanisms, magnitude, seasonal cycle, and variability of air-sea exchange of carbon dioxide in this region.

Supporting students and future investigators

Through the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) program, Bushinsky’s graduate student Shannon McClish received funding to characterize the impact of seasonal sea ice on the productivity of microscopic plants, called phytoplankton, in the Southern Ocean.

After phytoplankton bloom in surface ocean, they can sink to the deep sea and effectively pull carbon out of the atmosphere. McClish will combine satellite estimates of phytoplankton activity and chemical data from profiling floats to estimate how much carbon is shuttled to the deep during bloom events.

“This study will help us determine how sea ice influences regional patterns of organic carbon production by phytoplankton which is critical to understanding the Southern Ocean carbon cycle and potential future change,” said McClish.

“Together, these four projects will take us a long way toward understanding the mechanisms that drive carbon uptake in the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific, two ocean regions that are integral to the global carbon cycle,” said Bushinsky. “We also will greatly increase our ability to understand long-term changes and short, extreme variations in ocean biogeochemistry, a crucial tool in the face of ocean acidification, warming, and deoxygenation. There’s a lot of work ahead but I’m looking forward to expanding our group and uncovering some of the fundamental processes in ocean biogeochemistry.”  

Read also on UH News and Big Island Gazette.

University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa undergraduate student John Fast’s interest in science started when he entered middle school in Laguna Beach, California and participated in FIRST LEGO League Robotics competitions. For three years, his team, Team LEGOna Beach, built LEGO Mindstorm robots that could navigate and solve various puzzles on a set course. Their final year of competition, the team competed at LEGO Land, won, and brought home the coveted golden LEGO trophy.

“This solidified my interest in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math],” said Fast. “It pushed me towards wanting to continue studying STEM throughout high school and beyond.”

Fast joined the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) after his interest in weather patterns was sparked by a project about wind energy.

Sustainability of Hawai‘i’s freshwater

As an undergraduate student, Fast applied for and received funding for a research project through the UH Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. With Atmospheric Sciences assistant professors Alison Nugent and Giuseppe Torri as his advisors, Fast analyzed oxygen and hydrogen isotopes from five rainwater collection stations across the island of O‘ahu: UH Mānoa campus, Lyon Arboretum, Waikiki, Maunawili, and Kailua.

“Because over 99% of drinking water supply in Hawai‘i comes from rainwater, understanding where it comes from and its composition is vital for the future sustainability of the island,” said Fast. “We hope that once a more complete annual database of isotopic rainfall composition is established it can be used to predict rainfall events and impact on availability of drinking water.”

Lasers reveal vog compounds

This past summer, Fast was accepted into the Earth Science on Volcanic Islands (ESVI) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program hosted at SOEST and funded by the National Science Foundation. He worked with Shiv Sharma, a researcher at SOEST’s Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, using lasers to investigate the sulfur compounds in volcanic gases, also known as vog. These compounds have the potential to form a type of clouds that are responsible for acid rain, as well as depleting ozone.

Fast and Sharma used specialized technique, called micro-Raman spectroscopy, that utilizes a laser of a particular wavelength that shoots photons at a sample that are then scattered. The scattered photons generate a spectrum with each peak indicating a unique molecular compound. This method was used to identify the sulfur compounds present in a parcel of vog and, depending on the size and concentration of each sulfur compound, the possible impact of the vog.

“John was a critical element of our 2021 ESVI REU student cohort, sharing his local knowledge of campus and Oahu with our other visiting students, while successfully pursuing a really novel research project with Dr. Sharma to better understand the chemical makeup of surface aerosols emitted from Kīlauea,” said Bridget Smith-Konter, Earth Sciences professor and director of the ESVI REU program. “Iʻm really proud of John. It was a real pleasure to have in our summer REU program.”

Looking ahead

Fast is looking ahead to future opportunities, too.

“When I graduate in spring 2022, I would like pursue working for the National Weather Service (NOAA) wherever they need more people,” said Fast. “I would also love to be a local weather reporter anywhere in the US. I think it would be a blast to work at a large news station and share my interest with the community.”

Read also on UH News.

Strike-slip faulting, the type of motion common to California’s well-known San Andreas Fault, was reported recently to possibly occur on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. New research, led by planetary scientists from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), suggests this tectonic motion may be active on Titan, deforming the icy surface.

On multiple ocean worlds, for example Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, expressions of strike-slip faulting are well documented. Researchers believe the motion along these faults is driven by variations in diurnal tidal stresses—the push and pull caused by the relative motion of a moon and its planet.

Titan has a thick crust made of rock-hard water ice. And Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids in the form of lakes and seas on its surface. However, Titan’s liquids are hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane.

With limited observational data available, Liliane Burkhard, doctoral candidate and graduate student researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at SOEST, and co-authors examined the possibility for strike-slip tectonics using physics-based faulting models. The model calculations take into account the tidal stress on Titan, the orientations of candidate faults, crustal properties (including pore fluid pressure), and the stress needed to cause the surface material to fail or crack.

“Titan is unique because it is the only known satellite to have stable liquids on the surface,” said Burkhard. “We, therefore, were able to make an argument for integrating pore fluid pressures in our calculations, which can reduce the shear strength of the icy crust and may play a key role in the tectonic evolution of Titan.”

In this novel study, the scientists found that a combination of diurnal tidal stresses and pore fluid pressures promotes shear failure for shallow faults on Titan. Further, faults near the equator that strike near east-west are optimally oriented for potential failure. 

“This is an exciting revelation,” said Burkhard. “Our results suggest that under these conditions, shear failure is not only possible, but may be an active deformation mechanism on the surface and in the subsurface of Titan, and could potentially serve as a pathway for subsurface liquids to rise to the surface. This can potentially facilitate material transport that could affect habitability.”

Looking ahead to future missions

In the future, Burkhard hopes to conduct more research on the deformation of not only Titan but also other icy moons to uncover their tectonic history and astrobiological implications. Several remote sensing missions are scheduled to launch within the next few years to investigate Ganymede (ESA JUICE, 2022), Europa (NASA Clipper, 2024), and Titan (NASA Dragonfly, 2027).

“Combining new observations with our modeling techniques will strengthen our understanding of the icy crust and pinpoint the best location for exploration with a future lander mission and possibly access to the interior ocean,” she added.

Award-winning presentation at international conference

Burkhard presented portions of this work virtually at the Europlanet Science Congress last month and was selected as one of three winners at a conference of approximately 800 participants from nearly 50 countries. 

As part of a UH team, Burkhard was selected as a finalist—out of 1400 submissions worldwide—for Phase 1 of the OpenCV Artificial Intelligence (AI) Microsoft/Intel 2021 competition this Spring. While their project is aimed at quantifying the plastic pollution in Hawai‘i using AI cameras attached to drones, Burkhard said she hopes to take this type of AI research further and into the development of small autonomous companion probes for deep-sea vehicles that might someday explore the oceans of icy moons.

Read also on Forbes, Phys.org, Daily Mail, UH News and Eurekalert.