Titan's Sikun Labyrinthus

Scientists have found eerie similarities between Earth and Titan's largest moon

Utah's White Canyon. Papua New Guinea's Darai Hills. China's Gaungxi Province.

These three very different regions of the world have one thing in common: karst. Littered with sinkholes , karst is a type of landscape shaped by the dissolution of bedrock.

This terrain is strange on Earth. But what is even eerier is the discovery of a similar landscape in the Sikun Labyrinthus region on Saturn's largest moon Titan, the only object other than Earth on which astronomers have found evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid. The presence of karst terrain on Titan suggests the presence of underground caves.

"Even though Titan is an alien world with much lower temperatures, we keep learning how many similarities there are to Earth," said Karl Mitchell, a Cassini radar team associate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, in a recent NASA press release. "The karst-like landscape suggests there is a lot happening right now under the surface that we can't see."

"I've been in love with Titan since Cassini beamed down the first images of Titan's Shangri-La sand sea," said Mike Malaska, organic chemist and Cassini radar team collaborator based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "It's been amazing for the public to see data come down so quickly and get data sets so rich that you can practically imagine riding along with the spacecraft."

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image: This artistic interpretation of the Sikun Labyrinthus area on Saturn's moon Titan is based on radar and imaging data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft and the descent imaging and spectral radiometer on the European Space Agency's Huygens probe. The relative elevations are speculative and organized around the assumption that fluids are flowing downhill. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/ESA/SSI and M. Malaska/B. Jonsson)