In September 2023, the James Webb Space Telescope turned its infrared spectrograph toward Jupiter’s moon Europa — and what it found in the ice changed how scientists think about this world. Two independent research teams detected carbon dioxide concentrated in Tara Regio, a region of recently disrupted chaos terrain where the icy crust has been broken apart and refrozen. The carbon was not delivered by meteorites. It was not produced by surface radiation alone. Every line of evidence points downward — toward a buried ocean that may hold twice the volume of all of Earth’s oceans combined.
