Chaos

On Earth, when the icy surface of a northern lake or the Arctic ice cap breaks up, rafts of ice float around on patches of open water. These free-floating rafts may be portions of the ice crust that were thick enough to resist melting, or they may be large pieces of ice that broke off from the intact crust surrounding the melted zone, then drifted free on the water. In either case if the weather turns cold again, the rafts freeze in place, with a matrix of refrozen water between them.

When we obtained our first decent images of Conamara chaos in February 1997, we saw a surface that is indistinguishable from such terrestrial melt-through sites (Fig. 13.1). Large rafts of ice display portions of the previous surface, densely ridged tectonic terrain like what one sees on Conamara’s surroundings.