[astro-ph.EP] Titan, a unique body in the solar system, resembles a life-size Miller-Urey experiment where pockets of liquid water might interact with abundant organic matter.
Its young surface (less than a billion years) shows signs of material exchange with the interior, and an isotopic signature is detected in the atmosphere. Cryovolcanism and meteor impacts represent potential high energy mechanism for these exchanges. Although cryolava or impact melt properties are largely unknown, Titan’s internal structure makes a significant water content in these fluids highly probable.
The temperature of these fluid mixtures at the onset of the flows is above 0~∘C. The primary objective of this work is to investigate the dynamical and thermal properties of potential Titanian flows, while ensuring their spatial extents remain broadly consistent with the few available observations.
We also aim to assess whether their evolution could enable the hydrolysis of encountered organic material. On Earth, in the context of lava flow risk assessment, numerical techniques based on cellular automata have been developed for many years. This approach allows simulating the flow of Bingham fluids over distance scales of several tens of kilometers.
In the context of Titan’s surface, and within the explored parameter space, flows with a spatial extent of several tens of kilometers can be produced with our model. The resulting flow thickness is about a meter. The flow extent is primarily controlled by the total erupted volume and the terrain topology.
As expected, the rheology and thermo-physical properties of the erupted fluid have significant influence on the flow’s extent and the cooling rate of the cryolava. We predict hydrolysis reactions between an aqueous cryolava and the organic matter likely ubiquitous on Titan’s surface. Our model code is publicly available.
Panel (a) Composite image showing the Sotra Patera/Mohini Fluctus area, Mohini Fluctus is outlined in red . A RADAR Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) swath acquired during the T25 flyby is colorized using the Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) band ratio color composite mosaic described in Le Mouélic et al. (2019), where red is controlled by 1.59/1.27 µm ratio, green by the 2.03/1.27 µm ratio and blue by the 1.27/1.08 µm. In this color scheme, brownish tones correspond to dune fields and bluish areas may be enriched in water ice compared to the surroundings. Mohini Fluctus and its associated deposits. — [astro-ph.EP]
Daniel Cordier, Bastien Bodin, Stephane Le Mouelic, Ashley G. Davies
Comments: Accepted in Icarus. Our cellular automata code CALava (written in FORTRAN 2008) is publicly available at https://gitlab.univ-nantes.fr/cordier-d/calava, while all the numerical simulations computed in this work are available at https://zenodo.org/records/23038363
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.40058 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2609.40058v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.40058
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Submission history
From: Daniel Cordier
[v1] Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:20:26 UTC (4,058 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40058
Astrobiology,
