--- title: Jupiter Moon Io's Volcanoes Spew 'Lava Fountains' description: The conventional wisdom badly underestimates just how volcanically active Io really is. canonical: https://time.com/3087019/jupiter-moon-io-volcanoes/ author: Michael Lemonick article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-08-07T19:24:07.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:00:56.149Z article:section: Science og:title: Jupiter Moon Io's Volcanoes Spew 'Lava Fountains' og:description: The conventional wisdom badly underestimates just how volcanically active Io really is. og:url: https://time.com/3087019/jupiter-moon-io-volcanoes/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9b51bcfd8f786bc0/69869ebf35ba6f99fec03554/jupiter-moon-io.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4013 og:image:height: 2257 og:image:alt: JupiterS Moon, Io, Erupting Volcano. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Jupiter Moon Io's Volcanoes Spew 'Lava Fountains' twitter:description: The conventional wisdom badly underestimates just how volcanically active Io really is. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9b51bcfd8f786bc0/69869ebf35ba6f99fec03554/jupiter-moon-io.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # This Moon's Volcanoes Spew 'Lava Fountains' > Sponsored content. 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Education Images/UIG/Getty Images by [Michael Lemonick](https://time.com/author/michael-d-lemonick/) ## Michael Lemonick Aug 7, 2014 7:24 PM UTC It’s got to be the biggest coincidence in the history of science: just a few days before the Voyager 1 space probe began taking the first closeup images of Jupiter’s moon Io in 1979, [three astronomers predicted](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1747884?uid=3739808&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104564854623) that this distant orb, about the size of Earth’s moon, wouldn’t be dead and cold, as most believed. Instead, they said it would be hot and volcanically active – and sure enough, when Voyager began snapping pictures, Io proved to be [loaded with active volcanoes](http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/display.cfm?Category=Planets&IM%5FID=14007). More than three decades later, scientists are still trying to figure out just how active Io really is—and they just got an important new clue. In two papers just accepted for publication in the journal _Icarus_, planetary scientists and volcano experts are describing three massive eruptions that took place within a period of just two weeks last summer on the distant moon. “I’m really excited by this,” says Ashley Davies, a volcanologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-author of one of the papers. “It could be a game-changer.” The reason: Io isn’t continuously monitored, so scientists had to deduce the rate of major eruptions from a limited set of observations from the [Voyager](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,947037,00.html) and [Galileo](http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2071722,00.html) probes, along with occasional telescopic surveys from Earth. Based on this spotty record, said lead observer Imke de Pater, Davies’ co-author, in a statement, “We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and they’re usually not this bright.” It may be, she said, that the conventional wisdom badly underestimates just how active Io really is. Based on the eruptions’ brightness levels and the speed at which their light faded, Davies was able to model what they would have looked like close up. “We think they were ‘lava fountain’ events,” he says, in which cracks opened up on Io’s surface, spewing sheets of lava from their entire lengths at once. “We’re talking about an opening many miles long,” he says, and in Io’s low gravity, the curtain of lava could shoot up to a half-mile in the air. “These eruptions dwarf their terrestrial counterparts,” he added. The lava was evidently extremely hot as well—3000°F or more—suggesting that more of Io’s interior is melted than planetary scientists have previously thought. It’s also a sign that Io’s rock may be high in magnesium. “This really has profound implications for Io’s interior structure,” he says, “which the next mission will have to answer.” So far, that next mission is purely hypothetical. Io’s volcanoes also have implications for understanding volcanism on Earth, where massive outflows of lava have burst from underground in the distant past. “Large lava flows have shaped the surfaces of Venus, Mars and the Moon,” he says, “but no one has ever seen them erupt, so there’s a lot of uncertainty about the mechanism. Now we’re getting some vivid insight into a process that once shaped the surface of the Earth.” The one mystery Io’s volcanoes can’t solve is why the moon is volcanic in the first place rather than frozen solid. That’s because the solution came more than 30 years ago in that original paper, just days before Io’s volcanic nature was discovered. The heat comes from what Davies calls a “cosmic ballet,”—the tidal flexing of the moon’s interior caused by Io’s complicated gravitational interactions with its sister moons Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, as well as with Jupiter itself. The same kind of squeezing has created an [ocean of liquid water](http://science.time.com/2013/03/15/a-living-ocean-on-a-jovian-moon/) beneath Europa’s thick, icy crust, a place where life may plausibly have gotten a foothold—and in fact, NASA is contemplating a [return mission to study Europa in more detail](http://science.time.com/2014/03/04/nasa-plots-daring-flight-to-jupiters-watery-moon/). With this latest volcanic revelation, however, it might be worth taking a closer look at Io as well. ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] In general the Saturn system is truly an extrordinary light show. Youv'e got this geometrical profection of Saturn itself with its rings you know and you got all these moons orbiting around. [ MUSIC ] So my name is Michael Benson and I'm a photographer and filmmaker, and in the last decade I've been focusing on the visual legacy of interplanetary space exploration. [ MUSIC ] So I, I've taken on the role, in a way, of curator. [ UNKNOWN ] Of this work. And I'm making the case, that the visual legacy of 50 years of interplanetary space flight, constitutes a significant chapter in the history of photography, not just science. So the Cassini spacecraft, which is about the size of a school bus. Has been orbiting Saturn for, you know, the better part of the decade. [ MUSIC ] As a result, there's this incredible archive of raw data from Saturn and its moons from many different angles, many different inclinations, orbits and so on. There's a moon of Saturn. It's about half the size of the Earth's moon. It's called Insidilous. Cassini discovered when it flew past the first time, that Insidilous has geysers of liquid water erupting from its south pole, all the time. [ MUSIC ] That this will give a sense of how many frames it took to assemble to make the final composite. It's one of the images in the book that really constitute something new and a very worthy addition to this canon of interplanetary landscape photography. One of the images that I put together for my new book. [ MUSIC ] Eh shows Titan in transit in front of the rings of Saturn. It has a dense atmosphere. There're standing bodies of liquid on the surface of Titan. But Titan is, you know, 700 degrees below zero or something like that. And so what you have is the liquids on the surface are actually liquid ethane and methane. [ MUSIC ] Is lighter fluid. It definitely has a science fiction quality to it, which I enjoy. [ MUSIC ] You know, I went through the database of the Voyager fly bys of Jupiter and Galileo orbital mission of Jupiter and. As I, you know, I spent really a long time going through thousands and thousands and thousands of photos, you know. And then every once and a while there, there, there was an extraordinary moment where I would suddenly see something that was justabsolutely unbelievable, you know, absolutely incredible. The first things that I remember, really, are connected to that push in the late sixties by the United States to land people on the moon. And also at the same time, [ MUSIC ] You had, for example, the film 2001 a Space Odyssey, came out in 1968 and I was six years old and my mom took me to see it. And I was utterly amazed by it, probably the reason I'm doing what I do today is because 2001 a Space Odyssey, having seen that film. When I was six years old. [ MUSIC ] Definitely the scientists are trying to uncover new information. Discover new moons, etcetera. And I feel like I'm making my own kind of discoveries, you know, in this database. I'm looking for aesthetic. Discoveries. I'm looking for extraordinary landscape images, photos. 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