A lava lake on another world
Processed image. Simeon Schmauß calibrated and stitched framelets from Juno’s 3 February 2024 PJ58 flyby, raw observation JNCE_2024034_58C00026_V01; he submitted the result on 8 February. He interprets Loki Patera’s reflection in Jupiter-shine, rather than measuring lava temperature. His colour processing uses prelaunch camera sensitivities and adjusted white balance; radiation may leave uncorrected colour effects.
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported · resized to WebP
· Original image source · Image licenceVisible terrain and infrared observations tell different parts of the story of Io’s remarkable lava lakes.
- World
- Io
- Case date or period
- Observations · 1979–2024
Look closer
Chors Patera and Loki Patera are separate volcanic depressions on Io. Juno and Galileo observed them with instruments sensitive to different aspects of the landscape.
Follow the evidence
Schmauß’s photograph lets you examine reflected light around Loki; Perry’s comparison explores changes around Chors against an older basemap. Their processing choices remain visible in the captions. Infrared products supply separate thermal evidence: brightness in a visible photograph is not a temperature reading, and enlarging an image does not reveal extra camera detail.
Europa helped scan a lava lake from Earth
Katherine de Kleer and colleagues used Europa’s passage across Io in March 2015 to isolate thermal emission from successive parts of Loki Patera. Large Binocular Telescope observations during covering and uncovering allowed reconstruction of a temperature map. Cooling models suggested two resurfacing waves rather than one simple advancing front. This combines measured light with an inferred surface history: the accompanying wave animation is a simulation, not a recording of lava crossing the lake.
Loki does not match every hot-ring lake
Alessandro Mura and the JIRAM-Io team compared infrared observations of Loki from December 2022 through April 2024. Unlike several other lakes, Loki lacked a continuous bright thermal ring. Their analysis suggested a moving resurfacing signature, but persistent islands complicate simple models of a wholesale overturning crust. Heat patterns and cooling rates constrain proposed processes without uniquely identifying them. Chors’ hot margin and Loki’s changing thermal structure should therefore remain separate examples rather than a universal lava-lake template.
Sources & further reading
- Juno Captures Lava Lake Chors Patera on Io — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
- Io Loki in Infrared: Hot Edge — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
- Loki Patera — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
- Waves of lava seen in Io’s largest volcanic crater — de Kleer, Davies and colleagues — UC Berkeley / original investigator research account
- Observations of Loki Patera by Juno during close flybys — Mura and JIRAM-Io team — arXiv / author research manuscript (2024)
- Resolving Io’s Volcanoes from a Mutual Event Observation at the Large Binocular Telescope — de Kleer and colleagues — arXiv / original telescope investigation (2021)
- PJ58 #26 — calibrated and stitched Io photograph — Mission Juno / Simeon Schmauß
- PJ43 — Io photograph compared with a reprojected basemap — Mission Juno / Jason Perry