New research shows the jumbled ice blocks crowning the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa are signs of a large liquid lake the volume of the North American Great Lakes just below the surface, a key finding in the search for places where life might exist beyond Earth.

Drawing from studies of underground volcanoes in Iceland and Antarctica, scientists ran computer models to see if the chaotic formations on Europa's surface could be explained by the same geologic processes seen on Earth.

"We looked at melt underneath the ice and the fracture and collapse of ice shelves," Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics, told Discovery News.

"We come with these large pockets of water that form lakes. As they melt they actually break up the ice above it, like what you see on Earth," she said.

"This is certainly the best model so far," Paul Schenk, a staff scientist with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, wrote in an email to Discovery News. "If we go back with penetrating radar instruments we should be able to see into the ice shell, determine the stratigraphy of the layers in the shell and verify which models works best."

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