Ice volcanoes sound like something out of a Syfy-channel movie, perhaps produced by the same people behind the Sharknado franchise: a muddy mix of ice, rock, and salts erupting through cracks in the terrain and scattering out onto the landscape, freezing everything in its path. But they are in fact a natural phenomenon that scientists believe occurs across our solar system and beyond.
For several years now, scientists have been puzzling over one such volcano on the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres orbits more than 200 million miles from the sun, between Mars and Jupiter, where it reigns as the largest object in the asteroid belt. Ceres is made of rock and ice, and formed alongside the planets in our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. For years, scientists using computer simulations of conditions on Ceres predicted that the dwarf planet could host ice volcanoes, or cryovolcanoes.
To read more, click here.