Hacker News Reader

Would be cool if they got there and found layer upon layer of carcasses resembling whales, fish, trilobites ... seasoned with smaller organisms. A record of evolution, deposited over thousands of years of geyser activity, perfectly preserved and documenting every evolutionary bifurcation that ever swam too close to one of these blowholes.

I can dream, can't I?

View on HN

That's unlikely because ice is fairly dynamic. These geysers are proof that new ice is constantly being formed, and over the timescale needed to see any sort of evolution, the ice layer would have been reformed countless times.

It'd be like finding fossils around Kilauea in Hawaii. You don't because there's new land being formed all the time, and there's not enough time for fossils to be formed.

I imagined that such a geyser has a limited lifespan. Same mechanism as why islands like Hawaii or the super volcano in Yellowstone come in chains. Same thing could be happening on Europa: the icy crust moves and the "hot spot" is fairly fixed. Or a local vent collapses after x years and another weak spot opens. In those scenarios the area surrounding a geyser could preserve a chapter of the planet's history.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com