Saturn's Titan

Saturn’s largest moon is called Titan. It's huge, larger than the planet Mercury. It has rivers, lakes, dunes and mountains. The rivers and lakes are not water, though. They're methane. The moon Titan has the same weather pattern as earth. It rains, the methane falling into rivers and lakes, and then the methane evaporates into the atmosphere—rinse and repeat.

According to Wikipedia, Methane, a natural gas, is at the highest levels on the planet earth in 400,000 years. It is a gas at normal temperature and pressure. Burning methane in the presence of oxygen produces carbon dioxide and water. It also has a high global warming potential. The earth's crust and core contains huge amounts of methane. Methanogenesis is the formation of methane by microbes. Methane gas is also produced when vegetation decomposes without air. Enough from Wikipedia.

A recent article in Scientific American (what else?) by R. Lorenz and C. Sotin had some other interesting things to say about Titan. The planet is covered by giant sand dunes made from hydrocarbon molecules resembling coffee grinds or coagulated smoke. The sand dunes, higher than any we have here, are punctured by icy hills. If this isn't interesting enough, Titan's seasons last years, only having come out of a 15 year dark winter last August. Far out.

A moon filled with coffee colored sand dunes, can you imagine? These descriptions remind me of Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory where the rivers lakes and streams were made out of chocolate—except I don't think his clouds rained chocolate. What importance this has to me as a writer is knowing that other planets can have a climate where water can be replaced by something else. 

The possibilities are endless. Can you imagine a nitrous oxide based planet—everyone would be laughing all the time. Then there's the apocalyptic version of the story, Earth becomes Titan due to green house gasses—it's raining coffee!

That's enough for now.

KFran