Excuse my brain lock but .... Im just amazed. We used to sit around talking

about these things like some intellectual exercise, nowsomething has
actually
landed there and taken images no less and 'that' changes everything. I just

cant get my head around it all yet! Obviously, I dont belong in combat!
smiling ...





wrote:

Thierry wrote:
Hi,

I wonder why NASA didn't speak about the possibility that dark areas
could
be large icy surfaces.
They speak either of dry surface or liquid. But IMHO there is another
explanation.

Note that in hydrocarbons like methane and ethane, the liquid phase has
a lower density than the solid you get when it freezes. This means
that the "hydrocarbon seas" would not acquire a top coating of "ice"
when freezing began, but would freeze from the bottom up. Any ice
forming on the surface would sink. Water is almost unique in having a
solid form lighter than its liquid. Sorry, no ice skating on Titan.
What I think is reasonable would be a sea of tar or crude oil, what is
left behind when liquid methane rains out of the predominantly nitrogen
atmosphere and carries some of the orange photochemical smog with it
and then later evaporates. Over the eons since the formation of Titan
a lot of the methane and ethane in the primordial atmosphere must have
gotten converted into black goo. That is my bet for what the sea
consists of. I won't bet on the viscosity though. Could be anything
from pretty fluid stuff like crude oil all the way to asphalt.
Clif Ashcraft