Computational Modeling of Europa's Ice Shell

Planetary science is the study of different physical, atmospheric, and geological properties of planetary bodies in our Solar System. We are specifically interested in studying Jupiter's moon Europa, because of its large quantity of ice and water. This surplus of H₂O is an essential piece in the search for life beyond Earth, which means in order to understand how life could exist outside of Earth, we must first enhance our intuition about the conditions on this icy moon. In this project, we use computational analysis methods and a program called SeaFreeze to model and calculate the thermodynamic properties of water and ice to learn more about how different pressure and temperature conditions influence their molecular behavior and phase changes. Through this analysis, we find relationships for the thermodynamic properties across phase boundaries and for each type of ice. We apply this analysis to create a model for the interior of the ice layer on Europa, plotting properties such as density, p-wave velocity, and s-wave velocity as functions of depth. We find a semi-linear relationship for these properties, and require future analyses to study the effects of salt in order to gain a full picture of the interior of Europa.