Giant Ice Avalanches Found on Saturn’s Moon Iapetus - 1:00 PM -
Categories: Space When planetary scientist Kelsi Singer studied
images of Saturn’s icy moon Iapetus, she found something
unexpected: huge ice avalanches. As far as moons go, Iapetus is
as eccentric as they come. One half of the planet is light-
colored and the other half is dark. It has 12-mile-high
mountains — twice the height of Mount Everest. And a mountainous
ridge bulges out at its equator, giving it the distinct
appearance of a walnut. The avalanches are “something we never
expected to see on Iapetus,” said Singer, a graduate student in
earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St.
Louis and lead author of a paper published today in Nature
Geoscience. These icy landslides are similar to long-runout
landslides on Earth known as sturzstroms (German for
fallstreams), which can travel a distance equal to 20 to 30
times the height they fall from. Normal landslides typically
only travel twice the height they fall from.The Iapetus la