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"Neat" Pictures


Dr. Anomaly

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While spiffy in appearance, I don't think that one is physically possible.  A planet young enough (or gravitationally torqued enough) to have large-scale volcanism over a significant chunk of its surface also will have a surface too hot for large-scale liquid water to endure on the surface.  And the water surface wouldn't be blue without a substantial atmosphere, and then there ought to be lots and lots more clouds (all the water ought to be in vapor or cloud form, really); in that regard this reminds me of the pre-Apollo speculative paintings of Earth seen from space, where clouds were all but absent.  The circular features are clearly intended to be impact craters (in general volcanic craters don't have raised rims, which impact craters always start with), and large-scale volcanism tends to erase (fill in) impact craters.

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We see surfaces with both impact craters and active cryovolcanism at the same time (on Enceladus in particular: see e.g. here), but with cryovolcanism you don't see the glow of heat in the visible; you see it in the infrared.

 

You do see active volcanism on Io (e.g., here and here), but Io is so active the impact craters get buried very quickly and AFAIK there aren't any impact features of any size identified on Io.  But with Io again, though it is "standard" hot volcanism, the glow is still in the infrared, and not hot enough to be perceived in the visible part of the spectrum.

 

The root site for all those linked images is the NASA Planetary Photojournal.

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