you, too, can be a lava monster if you want to

[kaberett]

Friends Who Shall Remain Unnamed (but are welcome to identify themselves in comments) decided, earlier, that it would be hilarious to direct my attention towards this tiktok. It's captioned and audio's unnecessary, but the content goes like this:

So, somebody asked me a seemingly very innocuous question, "Is ice a rock?" and it is. Geologists say it is. Then someone else asked me a question that I knew the answer was going to be no to, "Well, if ice is a rock, is water lava?"

I was like, "No. There's no way this is gonna be-"

I looked it up and I'm reading about it, and it's like... it kinda is! Lava is any molten rock that comes out of a terrestrial planet. Now, molten means liquefied by heat. This is- *science frustration* I don't know what to believe anymore. Ice is a rock, water is lava, and you are a lava monster... I guess!?

Now. You need to understand, this is a group of people who have previously witnessed what happens when someone innocently says "hey, kab, can you... explain... this science fiction? it's saying this planet has a core made of low-density non-conductive metal--" i.e. WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY THINK A "METAL" IS THEN (tl;dr "electrons go whoosh") (honestly it took me an embarrassingly long time to hit the AND ANOTHER THING-- of "if it's low density it wouldn't have segregated to form a core--")

... so the betting pool was apparently 50-50 on whether they were going to get, you know, that kind of reaction or, instead, the one of OH BOY LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE EIGHTEEN DIFFERENT CRYSTALLINE FORMS OF ICE AND ALSO EUROPA'S ICE VOLCANOES--

... but they got the latter, and now you do too.

[this has been a Fun Geology interlude in your scheduled programme of Thesis Angst, sponsored by--]

Comments

[hairyears]

Presumably - or at least, plausibly - there are volcanoes spewing out the other common hydrides, too: liquefied methane ice, and ammonia.

Or even longer hydrocarbons than methane: if they can rain out of the atmosphere and form lakes on the surface of Titan, they can melt in the subsurface layers of accreted carbonaceous chondrites that orbit Jupiter or Saturn.

[hairyears]

Also: I am earwormed by Dolly Parton singing "Tholine, Tholine, THO-LI-II-INE!" and now you are, too.