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The current Venusian atmosphere has only ~200 mg/kg H 2 O(g) in its atmosphere and the pressure and temperature regime makes water unstable on its surface. Nevertheless, assuming that early Venus's H 2 O had a ratio between deuterium (heavy hydrogen, 2H) and hydrogen (1H) similar to Earth's Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water of 1.6×10 −4, [7] the current D/H ratio in the Venusian atmosphere ...
The relative "hot spot" is due to Neptune's axial tilt, which has exposed the south pole to the Sun for the last quarter of Neptune's year, or roughly 40 Earth years. As Neptune slowly moves towards the opposite side of the Sun, the south pole will be darkened and the north pole illuminated, causing the methane release to shift to the north pole.
The gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are thought to lack surfaces and instead have a stratum of liquid hydrogen; however their planetary geology is not well understood. The possibility of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune having hot, highly compressed, supercritical water under their thick atmospheres has been hypothesised.
Currently, cold surface bodies of liquid are found on two worlds in the Solar System, Earth and Saturn's moon Titan. [1] Earth is the only planet with liquid water on its surface. The other "oceans" are found under thick covers of surface ice. If both liquid and frozen water are counted, Earth ranks fifth in volume of its oceans. [2]
Because during their formation Uranus and Neptune incorporated their material as either ice or gas trapped in water ice, the term ice giant came into use. [ 2 ] [ 4 ] In the early 1970s, the terminology became popular in the science fiction community, e.g., Bova (1971), [ 5 ] but the earliest scientific usage of the terminology was likely by ...
Elevation histogram of the surface of the Earth—approximately 71% of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The pedosphere is the outermost layer of the Earth that is composed of soil and subject to soil formation processes. It exists at the interface of the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere.
Class III habitats are planetary bodies where liquid water oceans exist below the surface, where they can interact directly with a silicate-rich core. Such a situation can be expected on water-rich planets located too far from their star to allow surface liquid water, but on which subsurface water is in liquid form because of the geothermal heat .
A giant planet, sometimes referred to as a jovian planet (Jove being another name for the Roman god Jupiter), is a diverse type of planet much larger than Earth. Giant planets are usually primarily composed of low-boiling point materials (), rather than rock or other solid matter, but massive solid planets can also exist.