Piecing Together Titan’s Landscape

Titan’s Sikun Labyrinthus is a an area of connected valleys and ridges that bears a certain similarity to features on Earth. The area appears analogous to what we call ‘karst topography,’ created on our planet when layers of bedrock are dissolved by water, to leave rock outcroppings and sinkholes. The Darai Hills of Papua New Guinea are an example, as are the White Canyon of Utah and the Cockpit Country of Jamaica. Liquid methane and ethane may be what is producing such landscapes on Titan, but the processes seem familiar indeed.
Which brings us to Mike Malaska, without whose insights we might not be talking about this. Malaska is an organic chemist out of Chapel Hill NC who approached Jani Radebaugh (Brigham Young University) about a potential collaboration regarding Titan. Malaska works with visualizing NASA data and shares his results with contributors on unmannedspaceflight.com, where amateur astronomers and space exploration enthusiasts regularly discuss the latest findings. The beauty of today’s world is that rich data sets become available to the public in short order, allowing for contributions from unexpected quarters.
It was Malaska’s work tracing out landscape patterns on his computer that led to the obvious question: If many ...