How do ice-covered oceans transport heat and salt to their shells?
In plain words
In icy moons the ocean is heated from below and capped by ice, while the moon's spin deflects the flow. How the currents carry heat and salt to the ice determines where the shell thins and how the ocean's chemistry reaches the surface.
Precise statement
For rotating, bottom-heated ocean shells under ice (Europa and Enceladus parameters: depth, gravity, salinity, Ekman number $E \sim 10^{-10} \text{ to } 10^{-12}$), determine the latitudinal distribution of heat and salt flux to the ice base, including the anomalous density of fresh water near its freezing point, salinity stratification, and ice-pump feedbacks. An answer is a scaling law for heat-flux pattern and its dependence on salinity and rotation verified by simulations across regimes.
What would settle it
Rotating convection simulations and laboratory experiments that converge on scaling laws for polar versus equatorial heat delivery, compared with shell-thickness variations inferred from gravity and topography.