No moon in the solar system is like Jupiter's Europa, with an icy surface and a salty sea that may harbor life
And now, it appears that Europa has plate tectonics too-just like Earth, writes Nature World News.
The research team found clear evidence that Europa's icy crust was expanding - but they could not determine how the old crust was being destroyed to make room for the new layer.
Up until now, scientists had believed that Earth was the only world that possessed this type of surface-shifting geological activity, writes Nature World News.
'From a purely science or geological perspective, this is incredible,' study lead author Simon Kattenhorn of the University of Idaho told Space.com.
'Earth may not be alone. There may be another body out there that has plate tectonics. And not only that, it's ice!'
Plate tectonics relates to the scientific theory that Earth's outer layer is made up of plates or blocks that move - explaining why mountains and volcanoes form on the planet - as well as why earthquakes happen.
Kattenhorn and co-author Louise Prokter, of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, studied photos of Europa taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 until 2003, writes Nature World News.
They reconstructed the images, and were surprised to find that an area more than 12,000 square miles (nearly 20,000 square kilometers) was actually missing.
Their findings also suggest that this missing puzzle piece had moved under a second surface plate - a scene common on Earth with plate-tectonic boundaries.
Kattenhorn and his colleagues believe that this terrain was pushed into the interior rather than crumpled up as the two plates mashed against each other, writes Nature World News.
'Europa may be more Earth-like than we imagined, if it has a global plate tectonic system,' Kattenhorn said in a NASA news release.
'Not only does this discovery make it one of the most geologically interesting bodies in the solar system, it also implies two-way communication between the exterior and interior - a way to move material from the surface into the ocean - a process which has significant implications for Europa's potential as a habitable world.'
The findings were published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
