Future Desert Earth Could Look Like Titan

Titan, Saturn's largest satellite, may look like a future Earth after a massive heating process, said scientists who analyzed data sent from the zones below the murky atmosphere. Until very recently, this atmosphere inhibited understanding of Titan's surface, but the moon is currently undergoing study by the Cassini-Huygens mission and new information about it is accumulating.

Giant dunes and a waterless surface may be a grim vision of Earth's desert future. "Titan may be very different from Earth today, but maybe not Earth tomorrow," said Jonathan Lunine, Cassini-Huygens interdisciplinary scientist at the University of Arizona.

Some of the images sent back by the probe show very rugged terrain north of the lading site, including channels divided by ridges that can rise some 500 to 650 feet high, with slopes of 30 degrees, acting like drainage channels for the liquid methane rain falling on the surface.

"Rains on deserts on Earth can take be spaced by months to years, but on Titan we're talking about hundreds, maybe thousands, of years between episodes of major rainfall that comes down perhaps violently," Lunine said. "Because Titan is so much farther from the sun than Earth is, it takes longer for solar energy to evaporate methane and build it up in the atmosphere enough to generate storms."

A dried up Earth may not be only the consequence of a pollution-caused global warming, it could also be a result of other internal and cosmological factors, and even the Sun could sometimes be working against us, so knowing the possible future is essential for the survival of the human race.

The Cassini-Huygens mission will continue to do its duty of determining the time variability of Titan's clouds and hazes and to characterize Titan's surface on a regional scale, at least until 2008, when it will be decommissioned.