Europa may hide twice as much liquid water as all of Earth’s oceans combined, stirred by planet-spanning convective currents—but a 2025 model found that the magnetic field generated specifically by that moving saltwater would be weaker than one nanotesla, probably too faint for Europa Clipper or JUICE to isolate from the magnetic noise around Jupiter.

Europa presents a useful warning about scale. A moon slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon may conceal a global saltwater ocean containing more than twice as much liquid water as all of Earth’s oceans combined. The hidden sea is probably not still. Models describe convection, eddies, broad circulation cells and east-west currents moving beneath the ice.

Saltwater conducts electricity. Move enough of it through Jupiter’s magnetic field and it should generate an additional magnetic field of its own. That sounds like an unusually direct way to observe an ocean no spacecraft can reach.

A 2025 numerical study found the opposite practical result. Libor Šachl, Jakub Kvorka, Ondřej Čadek and Jakub Velímský calculated that the field made specifically by Europa’s convecting saltwater would remain below one nanotesla at the moon’s surface. Even their most favourable model barely approached the precision required of NASA’s Europa Clipper magnetic experiment.

The finding needs a careful distinction. Galileo’s magnetic evidence for Europa’s ocean remains intact. That evidence came from a larger, periodic response to changes in Jupiter’s field. The new paper examined a second and much smaller signal caused by the ocean water physically moving. This is one modelling study, not a detection or a settled limit on every possible Europan current.

A sea with twice Earth’s ocean water

Europa is about 3,120 kilometres wide. Its exterior is water ice marked by bands, ridges, fractures and disrupted regions called chaos terrain. Beneath that shell, several independent lines of evidence point toward a global liquid layer in contact with a rocky interior.

NASA’s current Europa description places the probable ocean at roughly 60 to 150 kilometres deep. A global layer of that thickness could contain more than twice the liquid water held by all of Earth’s oceans. The number is an interior-model estimate, not the result of drilling through the ice or mapping an ocean floor.

SpaceDaily previously examined one estimate that puts about 29 kilometres of solid ice above the ocean. Ice-shell figures vary because observations constrain combinations of thickness, composition, temperature and mechanical behaviour. The range is part of the question Europa Clipper is travelling to investigate.

The ocean-volume comparison is still robust enough to convey the scale. Earth’s seas are broad but average only about four kilometres deep. Europa offers less surface area, yet a liquid shell tens of kilometres deep wrapped around the entire moon adds up quickly.

There is no reason to expect that water to be motionless. Heat enters from the rocky interior and leaves through the ice. Europa rotates once per orbit, density changes as water warms, cools, freezes and becomes more or less salty, and Jupiter’s tides continually deform the moon. Together these processes can organise fluid motion across enormous distances.

A modelled ocean with global circulation

The broad case for an active ocean predates the 2025 magnetic study. A 2021 Nature Communications model by Yosef Ashkenazy and Eli Tziperman simulated a roughly 100-kilometre-deep ocean while including heating from below, interaction with the ice above, salinity changes caused by freezing and melting, and Europa’s full rotational influence.

The result was a weakly stratified sea whose density differences were controlled more by salinity than by temperature. It developed transient convection, eddies and zonal jets. Some motions formed columns aligned with Europa’s rotation axis. The calculated transport of heat from latitude to latitude was strong enough to help keep the overlying ice thickness relatively uniform.

Those currents have not been observed directly. They emerge from numerical representations of an ocean whose depth, salt content, bottom heat flow and ice boundary remain uncertain. Another model can produce different speeds or geometry. Still, the physical expectation that heat and rotation drive large-scale circulation is not exotic.

An older SpaceDaily report described how ocean currents may transfer heat into Europa’s ice shell. That connection matters because a circulation pattern can affect where ice is thin, where freezing or melting occurs and how material might move between the ocean and the surface.

Magnetism appeared to offer another possible window. If the current is salty enough to conduct electricity, its motion through an external field should leave a signature beyond the ice.

Europa produces two different magnetic responses

Discussion of an “ocean-induced magnetic field” can blur together two mechanisms. Both involve Europa’s conducting ocean and Jupiter’s field, but only one requires the water itself to circulate.

The first is ordinary time-varying induction. Jupiter’s magnetic axis is tilted by about 10 degrees relative to its rotation axis. As the planet turns, Europa experiences a field that changes in direction and strength on a period of roughly 11 hours. Europa’s 85-hour orbit introduces a second regular variation.

Those changing fields drive electrical currents in a conductor, much as a moving magnet can induce current in a coil. The currents in Europa’s salty ocean create a secondary magnetic field that opposes part of the change. Galileo measured perturbations consistent with that response, providing some of the strongest evidence for a conductive global layer.

NASA’s explanation of the induction experiment shows why measurements at both fundamental periods are valuable. The amplitude and phase of the response depend on how deeply the conductor is buried, how thick it is and how readily it carries current. That is the magnetic signal Europa Clipper is principally designed to use.

The second mechanism is motional induction. Conductive saltwater physically flowing through an existing magnetic field pushes charge carriers in a direction perpendicular to both the flow and the field. Those moving charges create electrical currents, and the currents produce another magnetic field. Its shape can preserve information about the ocean’s circulation.

The 2025 paper concerns this second signal. It does not say that the better-known periodic induction response is below one nanotesla, and it does not remove the magnetic case for an ocean.

The 2025 model puts the flow signal below one nanotesla

The Icarus study combined two demanding calculations. First, the Charles University team modelled thermal convection in a rotating spherical shell and scaled the results toward conditions expected in Europa. Then it solved the electromagnetic induction problem through simplified layers representing ice, ocean, silicate mantle and metallic core.

The flow calculations produced two broad regimes. One was dominated by a prograde equatorial jet, with little radial or north-south motion. The other, which the authors considered the more plausible regime for Europa, included large Hadley-like circulation cells in both hemispheres and a retrograde equatorial jet.

Across the study, the modelled circulation cells and zonal jets reached speeds up to about 0.3 metres per second. The magnetic outcome depended not only on speed, but also on direction. A jet travelling around lines of latitude can fail to produce an external signal under certain field geometries. In the idealised case of a vertical ambient magnetic field, the paper found that the zonal jets generate no external flow-induced field at all.

The circulating north-south and radial components did produce a pattern. The predicted radial and meridional field appeared in broad stripes around the moon. Yet its magnitude remained small.

For the strongest case, the team gave Europa an ocean 150 kilometres thick with electrical conductivity of 18 siemens per metre and covered it with only one kilometre of ice. Those assumptions make the conducting layer deep, highly conductive and unusually close to the surface. Even then, the modelled field at Europa’s surface was about one nanotesla or less.

One nanotesla is one billionth of a tesla. The unit alone does not decide whether a field can be measured. What matters is whether its particular pattern can be extracted from all other fields at the same place and time.

Why an earlier 20-nanotesla estimate shrank

A 2021 analysis had suggested a circulation-generated radial field as large as about 20 nanoteslas. That was not a spacecraft measurement. It was a scaling estimate built from representative values for Jupiter’s field, ocean conductivity and the speed of a previously modelled circulation.

The 2025 team revisited the problem with slower ocean flow and a fuller electromagnetic solver. It attributed the much smaller result primarily to the more sluggish circulation and the correct treatment of electromagnetic induction. Even when the researchers adopted flow and conductivity choices designed to resemble the earlier setup, their calculation produced a field three times smaller.

The remaining reduction came from exploring how ocean and ice thickness and conductivity affect the signal, together with the geometry of the currents. A fast flow is not enough by itself. Motion parallel to an unhelpful field direction may create little external signature, while currents generated within conducting layers interact and diffuse rather than adding in the simplest possible way.

This is an important restraint on interpretation. “Planet-spanning currents” sounds like a promise of a large magnetic feature. A current can be geographically extensive and still produce a weak exterior field if its speed, symmetry and surrounding conductivity work against detection.

Jupiter is a difficult place to hear one nanotesla

Europa Clipper’s sensors are capable instruments, but the relevant comparison is not between one nanotesla and a perfectly quiet laboratory. The spacecraft will measure a total field in a complicated plasma environment.

The Europa Clipper Magnetometer instrument paper describes the task as reconstructing Europa’s principal induction response to within 1.5 nanoteslas in an ambient field of roughly 500 nanoteslas. The individual sensors are quieter than that figure. The 1.5-nanotesla requirement includes the much larger problem of calibration, spacecraft contamination, geometry and combining measurements from many brief flybys.

The spacecraft itself contains hundreds of magnetic sources, from valves to currents in its solar arrays. Three sensors sit at different points on an 8.5-metre boom so the team can estimate how that local contamination falls with distance and subtract it.

Jupiter’s plasma presents a less controllable complication. Charged particles from Io, Jupiter and Europa carry electrical currents that bend and distort the magnetic field near the moon. Europa’s thin ionosphere adds another contribution. NASA built the Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding to measure plasma density, temperature and flow, allowing those effects to be modelled alongside magnetometer data.

That work is aimed chiefly at isolating the stronger periodic ocean response. Extracting an additional flow field predicted to sit at or below one nanotesla would require its spatial pattern to survive imperfect knowledge of Jupiter’s field, plasma currents, Europa’s ionosphere, spacecraft fields and the moon’s conventional induction signal.

For that reason, “probably too faint” is a practical judgement, not a statement that either spacecraft’s detector is physically incapable of registering a one-nanotesla change. A tiny reading is not useful unless researchers can identify which source made it.

Clipper and JUICE still have several ways into the ocean

Europa Clipper is already en route to Jupiter and is due to begin its Europa campaign in 2030. SpaceDaily previously followed the mission’s long 1.8-billion-mile route and its habitability question. It will not orbit Europa because repeated exposure to Jupiter’s radiation would shorten the spacecraft’s working life. Instead, it will make dozens of close passes from a safer orbit around Jupiter.

The magnetometer and plasma instrument are only part of the strategy. Radar will probe the ice and search for internal structure or shallow water. Radio tracking will measure Europa’s gravity and tidal flexing. Cameras and thermal observations will map geology and possible warm regions. Spectrometers and particle instruments will analyse surface material, gas and dust.

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, JUICE, will make two Europa flybys before concentrating on Ganymede. Its instrument suite includes a magnetometer and plasma sensors. The ESA explanation of magnetic ocean sounding is based on the same main principle: salty water responds to Jupiter’s changing field, allowing an orbiting instrument to infer an unseen conductor.

Neither mission needs to detect the circulation-generated field for its ocean investigation to succeed. Their primary magnetic objective is the regular induction response. Combining it with radar, gravity and topography should reduce ambiguities that magnetism alone cannot remove.

A non-detection can still constrain a hidden sea

The sub-nanotesla prediction does close off an appealing possibility. If the flow field were tens of nanoteslas strong, its pattern might have provided a new way to map the movement of Europa’s ocean from above the ice. At the new estimate, that form of magnetic oceanography looks considerably harder.

It is not necessarily useless. A well-characterised upper limit could rule out some combinations of extremely fast circulation and high conductivity. If an unexplained, stable pattern does appear after the known contributions are removed, the model supplies geometries against which it can be tested. Better constraints on ice thickness, salinity and ocean depth will also reduce the range of predicted flow fields.

The result is ultimately a lesson in what remote sensing asks of a signal. Europa’s ocean can be huge, deep and active while its circulation remains magnetically almost silent outside the ice. The moon’s strongest magnetic clue comes not from the sea advertising its own motion, but from its saltwater answering the rhythm imposed by Jupiter.