Unexpected Similarities Between Titan And Mars

The processes of erosion and physics are universal

   One of the most unexpected findings from the Titan images was how utterly Earthlike many of its features are.  The showing of plains and lakes, islands and shorelines, rivers and rocks took most people by surprise.  When you consider how far from the Sun that Titan is, and how cold it is, you can see why its appearance and features were so surprising.

   Titan is very cold with a temperature of about -180 C (or -290 F).  This means that water will not be a liquid; in fact, water ice is a mineral on Titan.  The brightest summer day on Titan is as dark as a full Moon night on the Earth.  It also is as large as a planet- Titan is slightly larger than Mercury and Pluto.  If it were in orbit around the Sun, we would call it a planet without any qualms.  It also has the most amazing atmosphere- about 1.5 times as dense as our atmosphere, but very different in composition.

   Titan has mostly nitrogen in its atmosphere with the rest made up of methane and other gases.  It shows thick, orange smog from space; clouds loaded with organic molecules and hydrocarbons.  It is literally a world soaked in petroleum compounds and the basic stuff of life.  But without liquid water, life as we know it cannot exist there.

   So what is most surprising is how closely Titan resembles Mars.  I found one features very telling; the existence of "moat rock" identical to those I have researched on Mars.  Here is a visual comparison.

I started out by creating the most clear image I could from the data that Huygens sent back.  I took four raw images and resampled them at 170%, then frame stacked them with a slight offset to minimize JPG compression noise.  This is the resulting image.    In the middle distance, there is a large upright rock.  It may be a block of ice or it may be an actual mineral, but the most important feature is at its base.  See the ring in the soil around this rock?    Now let's compare this to an identical feature on Mars.
Here are three "moat rocks" located in Gusev Crater on Mars.  Spirit rover imaged these on various sols.  Here is my page detailing the findings and explaining the phenomenon.    Look at the marked up Titan image on the far right.    What is happening here is this- water underground is boiling off in a crevice and emerging as steam- these rocks cap off fumaroles, and the emerging steam is blowing the sand away from under each rock.  In other words, heat and a liquid underground are responsible for this feature.  Now, what about Titan?    Since we know that Titan cannot have liquid water on its surface, and that the ground temperature is very low (except in pockets where geothermal heating occurs), this is clearly the result of some other fluid.    I discount steam because it would have other telltales like ice crystals and heat.  Two remaining possibilities are dry ice being heated and emerging as carbon dioxide gas (but I do not see this as very likely), and the emergence of hydrocarbon vapor such as methane or ethane, also being heated underground.	Mars	Titan

        So it turns out that Titan is a geologically active world, not too different from Earth or Mars.  Only the temperature and the composition of its liquid- methane and ethane- are substantially different.  But what this demonstrates is that erosion mechanisms are dominated by the exact same physics that is at work on Mars and on Earth.