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Sometimes, all you need for a new discovery is some creative math. That was the case for a new paper by Edward Williams and Laurent Mont\u00e9si of the University of Maryland\u2019s Department of Geology. They released a brief paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last month that describes a mathematical way to estimate the size of a lava tube using only remote sensing techniques.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n A critical starting point was the discovery that the ridge height of a surface above a lava tube is proportional to the cube of the height of the lava tube\u2019s roof. Plenty of lava tubes have been studied in detail on Earth, and those studies were used to form the basis of that equation.<\/p>\n However, until now, there was no relationship between the roof thickness and the details of the shape of the lava tunnel itself. Enter physical modeling \u2013 the authors used a physics modeling program (COMSOL Multiphysics) to model different roof heights based on different characteristics of tunnels.<\/p>\n \n