Climate science is highly interdisciplinary by nature, so understanding interactions between Earth processes inherently warrants the use of analytical software that can operate across the disciplines of Earth science. Toward this end, we present the Climate Data Toolbox for MATLAB, which contains more than 100 functions that span the major climate‐related disciplines of Earth science. The toolbox enables streamlined, entirely scriptable workflows that are intuitive to write and easy to share. Included are functions to evaluate uncertainty, perform matrix operations, calculate climate indices, and generate common data displays. Documentation is presented pedagogically, with thorough explanations of how each function works and tutorials showing how the toolbox can be used to replicate results of published studies. As a well‐tested, well‐documented platform for interdisciplinary collaborations, the Climate Data Toolbox for MATLAB aims to reduce time spent writing low‐level code, let researchers focus on physics rather than coding and encourage more efficacious code sharing.
Despite evidence for plumes on Jupiter's moon Europa, no surface features have been definitively identified as the source of the plumes to date. Furthermore, it remains unknown whether the activity originates from near-surface water reservoirs within the ice shell or if it is sourced from the underlying global ocean. Here we investigate brine pocket migration, studied previously in the context of sea ice on Earth, as a process for transporting brine along thermal gradients. We show that the fracture system located in the center of Europa's Manannán crater is consistent with the formation of a subsurface brine reservoir. After the initial impact, residual aqueous melt concentrated via brine pocket migration as the target material cooled. Freezing and overpressurization then resulted in a cryovolcanic eruption. The volume of the emptied reservoir and the critical composition at the end of migration provide further constraints on the average salinity of Europa's ice shell. Plain Language Summary Jupiter's satellite Europa has a subsurface ocean covered by an icy shell. We show how small pockets of brine can migrate within the ice from colder areas to warmer areas. This can happen even at very low temperatures, below the point where pure water would freeze, because the water becomes saltier and saltier as it migrates. By looking at an impact crater on Europa, which was initially warm in the center and cooled inward from its colder surroundings, we can study how the water migrated toward the center and formed a central water reservoir. As the final water pocket at the center of the crater started to freeze, the increasing pressure lead to a cryovolcanic eruption that emplaced brine onto the surface to form a prominent "spider" feature before the ice collapsed into the cavity below. Using a digital terrain model of the crater and collapse feature, we estimate how much water erupted and how salty Europa's ice shell is.
The presence of liquid water has long guided the search for life beyond Earth (Des Marais et al., 2003). Once thought to be confined to the "Goldilocks zone," vast oceans have been inferred to exist beneath the thick ice shells of moons in the outer solar system (Hand et al., 2020). Although these sub-ice oceans represent the most compelling potential habitats in the outer solar system (Shematovich, 2018), they are covered by ice shells that can range from kilometers to hundreds of kilometers thick (Soderlund et al., 2020). Impurities within the ice shell, such as salts, acids, or organic compounds, could allow for liquid water to remain stable at temperatures well below that predicted by the pressure-melting curve of pure water (Marion et al., 2003(Marion et al., , 2005Ruiz et al., 2007). These impurities support the formation of intra-ice shell brine pockets, which could represent potential habitats that might be more accessible than the sub-ice ocean (Kargel et al., 2000;Marion et al., 2003).Estimating the distribution of brine in an ice shell represents an important step in studying the habitability of ocean worlds. The brine volume fraction governs a number of bulk ice thermophysical properties, such as density, thermal conductivity, specific heat capacity, and viscosity (Petrich & Eicken, 2017). These thermophysical properties in turn govern processes of surface-ice-ocean exchange (e.g., solid-state convection, subduction, diapirism),
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