niktemadur

This is what I'm visualizing:
A liquid ocean pressed against the inner side of Europa's ice crust, during high tide. Then the tide shifts and the water rushes away, leaving a gigantic hollow shell high above the ocean's surface, like a vast dome stretching towards the horizon in all directions, in total darkness.

Meanwhile, the tidal bulge has rushed halfway across the hemisphere, the water is now pressing against the ice crust there.

If the Jovian system's tidal forces can stretch and knead Io's mantle like silly putty, its' rocky surface rising and falling as much as 100 meters (about 300 feet) each tidal cycle... I can't even imagine how violently the water may slosh under Europa's ice crust.

One final note: considering that Europa is tidally locked with Jupiter, and it is Ganymede and Callisto that can pull in other directions, how long are the tidal cycles there? The principle is like on Earth, but there are extra gears in the mechanism, so to speak, different high and low tides may vary widely between each other.

The voice and the diction and the rhythm, Sir Alec elevates further what is already a stunning masterwork.

Wherever there is matter in an ever-thinning universe, there might be an entire cosmologically-sized era dominated by an entirely different chemistry to what we have now.