Scientists have discovered evidence that suggests Europa, the sixth-nearest moon to Jupiter, has gigantic plates of ice that shuffle around the moon in a movement similar to that of Earth's tectonic plates.

Geologist Simon Kattenhorn and planetary scientist Louise Prockter pieced together pictures from NASA's Galileo spacecraft that orbited Europa from 1995 to 2003. Although the majority of the photos were blurry, the pair focused on some of the few places on the moon that had high-resolution pictures.

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Kattenhorn and Prockter tried to trace the transformation of Europa's surface by piecing together the images, a process akin to a person putting together a jigsaw puzzle. They used bands, ridges and other geological markings divided by movements of the moon's crust as their landmarks.

"When we moved all the pieces back together, there was a big hole in the reconstruction, a sort of blank space," said Katterhorn, who previously worked at the University of Idaho.

The researchers concluded the missing portion must have somehow descended into the inside of the moon.

Prockter, from the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, and Kattenhorn suggest a system of plate tectonics is present on the moon. A shell of ice a few kilometers thick is shuffling through regions with warmer and more fluid ice.

The scientists propose that if an ice plate collides with another and one of them subducts, or begins to sink into the moon, it then begins to melt and ends up a constituent of the ice underneath the other plates.

Some regions of Europa have already been identified as the birthplace of new ice crust. The most recent research is the first to point out where the crust sinks into the moon and melts.

TagsJupiter, moon, Europa, solar system, Ice, Plate Tectonics, Earth