Abstract
We explore the possibility that Callisto’s ocean sits beneath its
high-pressure ice, rather than above it. Oceans perched between ice
phases are considered to be stable configurations for Ganymede,
Callisto, and Titan. High-pressure ices under the liquid water ocean
will transport heat and solutes into the ocean as long as the convective
adiabat for the ices remains close to the melting temperature (Choblet
et al. 2017, Kalousova and Sotin 2018). However, this configuration may
become unstable when the perched ocean is close to freezing and its
salinity increases, if the ocean becomes denser than the underlying ice.
Among the oceans in the solar system, Callisto’s must be among the
coldest and most saline because the internal heat appears to be low in
the absence of tidal dissipation. Surface geology indicates its
lithosphere is fully stagnant (Moore et al. 2004). Solid-state
convection may continue beneath less than 100 km or dirty non-convecting
ice (McKinnon 2006). And just below this layer may reside a liquid water
ocean that is the lag deposit of Callisto’s thicker primordial ocean,
the concentrated result of 4 Gyr of freezing. Using representative
interior structures based on the current constraints from the Galileo
mission (Anderson et al. 2001) coupled with recently obtained
thermodynamic data (Vance et al. 2018), we demonstrate the possibility
for using magnetic induction to identify where the ocean currently
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