Ultramafic: Io Story (Draft 2)
Cover your ears, and run.
Disappearing behind you is the edge of Tvashtar Paterae, a superheated ultramafic volcano erupting a wall of liquid sulfur taller than the state of Arizona. It will erupt here for months, destroying and resurfacing huge swaths of the moon before the atmosphere collapses, freezing it to the ground. But it isn’t nighttime yet, and you feel the ground beneath you disintegrating like sugar in a hot pan.
This moon is being heated, streatched by the gravitational influence of its sisters Ganymede, Enceladus and Europa.
As they swing close to Io, their gravitational fields compress and stretch the planet creating enough internal friction to spawn hundreds of volcanoes, heating parts of the topography from a frigid -130c to 1600c.
And that process isn’t something you’d want to hear. On Io, it is so hot durring an eruption that hearing one would be like experiencing a planetary pitch shift- Starting low and quiet and ending in what would sound like a billions of silver knives erupting into the air.
But high frequencies don’t travel very far and the atmpshere isn’t dense for long, so keep running.
Keep your eyes forward.
Focus on the yellow volcanoes that punctuate your distant vision. Look up, Io is face to face with Jupiter. It’s so close you could see the cloud tops; it would feel like you were spiraling in.
Surface Pressure - http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/ESS590/ioatmos.pdf
Lunar Comparisons - https://www.space.com/18067-moon-atmosphere.html
Basic Info - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/io
More Basic Info (video) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkfDnIQsEXs
Color reference - https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/174427main_image_feature_804_ys_ful.jpg
Topographical Map - http://img.gawkerassets.com/post/8/2012/03/iomapnew.jpg
More insight (general)- https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/io/indepth
Video Lunar Comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2adl6LszcE&t=69s
More on Ionian Lava - http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a26474/io-jupiter-moon-lava-waves/
Volcanoes- https://www.space.com/33633-jupiter-moon-io-collapsible-atmosphere.html