![Crescent view of Europa, one of Jupiter’s four large, Galilean moons, in a composite of images made …[Credits : NASA/JPL/University of Arizona]](http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/85/75385-004-07D953E7.jpg)
Crescent view of Europa, one of Jupiter’s four large, Galilean moons, in a composite of images made by the Galileo spacecraft in 1995 and 1998. Colours have been exaggerated in processing to reveal subtle differences in surface materials. The reddish lines in the moon’s icy crust are cracks and ridges, some of them thousands of kilometres long, while the reddish mottling indicates areas of disrupted ice, where large ice blocks have shifted. The red material may be salt minerals deposited by liquid water that emerged from below the surface. The relatively few craters indicate that the icy crust has been relatively warm and mobile for at least a good part of Europa’s early history.
Link to this article and share the full text with the readers of your Web site or blog-post.
If you think a reference to this article on "" will enhance your Web site,
blog-post, or any other web-content, then feel free to link to this article,
and your readers will gain full access to the full article, even if they do not subscribe to our service.
You may want to use the HTML code fragment provided below.
We welcome your comments. Any revisions or updates suggested for this article will be reviewed by our editorial staff. Contact us here.
Regular users of Britannica may notice that this comments feature is less robust than in the past. This is only temporary, while we make the transition to a dramatically new and richer site. The functionality of the system will be restored soon.