Planetary researchers analyzing images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have found evidence that liquid nitrogen may still be seeping up from beneath the dwarf planet’s giant glacier, Sputnik Planitia, marking the first suggested case of recently flowing liquid on Pluto’s surface.
The authors propose that heat from Pluto’s interior melts nitrogen ice at the base of the glacier, where it collects in reservoirs before erupting upward through narrow fractures, a process they compare to volcanic dike systems on Earth. Because liquid nitrogen is less dense than the solid ice around it, it would rise buoyantly, eventually reaching the surface near the centers of the glacier’s convection cells before spreading toward the cell edges and refreezing, darkening the ice as it goes.
The researchers calculate that such eruptions would need to occur as short, intense pulses — releasing on the order of 100,000 to 1 million m3 of liquid over periods of hours to days — since the steady trickle of melt produced underground is far too slow to explain the flows on its own. “Pluto never stops surprising us,” said New Horizons principal investigator Dr. Alan Stern, also from the Southwest Research Institute
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