The complexity of water freezing under reduced atmospheric pressure – insights on effusive cryovolcanism from laboratory experiments

Exploration of the Solar System has revealed that the surfaces of many icy bodies have been resurfaced by cryovolcanism: a process during which liquid and vapour are released from the surface into extremely cold and low pressure conditions. Water is one of the most commonly released liquids, and its stability and behavior under such conditions are thus of special interest. When exposed to low pressure, water boils, but it may also start freezing at the phase boundary due to evaporative cooling, as indicated by previous studies. There is only limited insight into how exactly the multiple phase transitions interact and what parameters control the dynamics of the system. To overcome this knowledge gap, we performed experiments in which we simulated the release of water at low pressure and low temperatures, such as could be encountered at local conditions at the  surface of an icy moon.

We used the Mars Simulation Chamber at The Open University (UK), in which a 60 x 40 cm container containing 5 and 17 litres of water was exposed to a reduced atmospheric pressure of ~4.5 mbar. Deionised water was mixed with a small amount of NaCl to achieve a salinity of 0.5% and was precooled to ~3.8°C to be close to the freezing point. Experiments were documented by video cameras situated around the container and the temperature inside the chamber and of the water was recorded by thermocouples.

At the beginning of each experiment, the atmospheric pressure was gradually reduced from ambient, which triggered boiling within the entire volume of water and evaporative cooling in its uppermost layer. This caused a gradual drop in the water temperature down to the freezing point, forming pieces of floating ice. The area where ice was present slowly grew and within timescales of a few minutes the entire surface of the container was covered with ice. However, the ice layer was broken into blocks with uneven surfaces. This was due to active boiling below the freezing layer of the water, with the intense formation of vapour bubbles which were capable of breaking and/or uplifting the ice. Once the fracture(s) developed, trapped vapour was released and deflation followed. Experimental results show that the process was more intense when larger amounts of water were used within the container, which significantly disrupted the freezing of water in those experiments and affected the final topography of the ice layer.

Our experiments show that water phase transition during effusive cryovolcanic eruptions are likely to be a highly complex process due to boiling causing major ice fracturing and the formation of topographical anomalies on the frozen surface.