Extreme methane rainstorms appear to have a key role in shaping Titan's icy surface

Titan, the largest of Saturn's more than 60 moons, has surprisingly intense rainstorms, according to research by a team of UCLA planetary scientists and geologists. Although the storms are relatively rare—they occur less than once per Titan year, which is 29 and a half Earth years—they occur much more frequently than the scientists expected.

        

"I would have thought these would be once-a-millennium events, if even that," said Jonathan Mitchell, UCLA associate professor of planetary science and a senior author of the research, which was published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Geoscience. "So this is quite a surprise."
The storms create massive floods in terrain that are otherwise deserts. Titan's surface is strikingly similar to Earth's, with flowing rivers that spill into great lakes and seas, and the moon has storm clouds that bring seasonal, monsoon-like downpours, Mitchell said. But Titan's precipitation is liquid methane, not water.
"The most intense methane storms in our climate model dump at least a foot of rain a day, which comes close to what we saw in Houston from Hurricane Harvey this summer," said Mitchell, the principal investigator of UCLA's Titan climate modeling research group.
Sean Faulk, a UCLA graduate student and the study's lead author said the study also found that the extreme methane rainstorms may imprint the moon's icy surface in much the same way that extreme rainstorms shape Earth's rocky surface.


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