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RandomFactor writes:

In a paper published Monday, scientists have spotted a massive expanse of water-ice stradling Saturn's enigmatic moon Titan.

That ice block stretches across nearly half of Titan's girth. The feature was a surprise companion to the patches of water ice scientists expected to find, and they aren't positive precisely what sort of geologic feature it might indicate. The research is based on data gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which spent 13 years studying the Saturn system and made more than 100 flybys of the massive moon before self-destructing in September 2017.

The information was gleaned using a new statistical technique called "Principal Component Analysis" that filtered out dominant features in data obtained by Cassini to uncover smaller signatures such as water ice.

[Caitlin Griffith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona] said she isn't sure yet what the massive line of ice, which she compares to a scar, represents—it will take more research to pin down what left the ice uncovered on the surface of Titan. "It's a big feature that tells us something about the way that Titan was in the past, but we don't know really what it is," she said. "I think right now it's basically telling us that it's complicated, the surface is fairly complicated."

Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University in Utah not associated with the research, speculated that the ice belt might be due to a massive geological faulting event (Titan-quake?) pushing a stretch of the icy bedrock upward leaving it exposed.

Caitlin A. Griffith, Paulo F. Penteado, Jake D. Turner, Catherine D. Neish, Giuseppe Mitri, Nicholas J. Montiel, Ashley Schoenfeld & Rosaly M. C. Lopes, A corridor of exposed ice-rich bedrock across Titan's tropical region, Nature Astronomy (2019), DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0756-5

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