Why Enceladus’ Ice Is Part of the Climate Change Conversation

eneath the icy surface of Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, an ocean dwells. Traces of it get expelled skyward through cracks in the crust via cryo-volcanic plumes. What’s found in the ice grains and vapor are nothing less than the rudiments of life. “We are, yet again, blown away by Enceladus,” Christopher Glein, a space geoscientist at the Southwest Research Institute, in Texas, , remarking on. They found in the data gathered by the Cassini spacecraft evidence of complex organic molecules with masses well above those discovered in prior analyses. “We must be cautious,” Glein went on, “but it is exciting to ponder that this finding indicates that the biological synthesis of organic molecules on Enceladus is possible.”