Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/02/the-deep-methane-lakes-of-titan.html
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I wonder about the viscosity and dynamic of this liquid. Thinner/less dense than water on earth? How does gravity affect the dynamic of surface wave motion, etc; density of the atmosphere. Do they characterize these lakes anywhere?
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Beside one of these lakes is where the robot Salo breaks down in Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens Of Titan.
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I am also intrigued by the naming of such lakes, and wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall when those were proposed.
The IAU (unsurprisingly) has rules for how to name surface features on other worlds, and they usually pertain to some aspect of mythology that’s related to the body’s own name (Pluto’s features are all related to the underworld in some manner, for instance, though most of the names they’ve been given so far haven’t been given final approval yet).
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Stephen Baxter wrote a novel about a last ditch, suicidal mission to the north polar region of Titan. At one point the characters improvise a boat and use it to sample the bottom of one of the lakes. The wind comes up and they can see huge, slow waves building in the distance but they reckon they are an hour away so they take their time getting to shore.
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Speaking of Titan (and Kraken Mare specifically) in fiction, it shows up in Bungie’s lore about the Golden Age and Collapse of humanity, in the lore book “Last Days on Kraken Mare”.
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Ah, remember those balmy days, when we’d sail the methane lakes of Titan and watch in awe the pterodactyls wing and screetch, swooping from on high to snatch unsuspecting kraken to feed to their young.
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