Water-less Geysers

National Geographic News reports on a new model, published online in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that removes the need for liquid water in explaining the “unusual” geysers on Enceladus’s south pole:

A shell made of icy compounds is exposed by the ridges, causing the compounds to decompress and absorb heat. The compounds then explosively split into smaller parts and send ice crystals and gases skyward.

This could replace an earlier model that suggests Enceladus’s interior is warm and similar to earth’s with shallow pockets of liquid water just beneath the surface, although study coauthor Gustavo Gioia of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign cautions that this “doesn’t mean that there is no [liquid] water. . . . It just means that you can explain the whole thing without there being water there.”

Additionally, senior research scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado—who is a member of the team that originally suggested the liquid-water model as an explanation for the geysers—believes “[t]here’s still a very good chance there is liquid water deep beneath the surface on Enceladus.”

Of course, the importance of liquid water in evolutionists’ eyes is its life-sustaining (life-giving, they might say) role, and thus, this new model, as the article states, “may put hopes for life [on Enceladus, anyway] on ice” (although it appears that they still have hopes for the potential of liquid water under the surface that forms this ice via geysers). We don’t doubt, though, that many evolutionists “keep the faith” that extraterrestrial signs of life are likely to turn up on Enceladus or elsewhere—despite the fact that many of them are ignoring the only signs of intelligence that have “turned up” so far: signs of their Creator!