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What are the positive human impacts on energy conservation?

How does the conservation of energy work with warm-core moons such as Io?

  • I saw a document about Jupiter's moons Europa and Io being warmed by the flexing caused by gravitational pull of the planet they're orbiting, Jupiter (reference: http://www.solarviews.com/eng/iovolcano.htm). The first question that comes to mind is: where is that energy taken from? Surely conservation of energy cannot be violated. Edit: I understand why Io heats up (thanks Malcom for the tide analog). But thinking of energy conservation, there are at least the following obvious energy sources: Io's potential energy in Jupiter's gravitational field and Io's kinetic energy while it travels almost 20km/s in space. As Io heats up, where is that thermal energy taken from? It's potential energy in Jupiter's gravitational field? How could that work exactly?

  • Answer:

    The energy is derived from the DIFFERENCE in gravitational force between the front (facing Jupiter) and rear (facing away from Jupiter) of IO, just as the Moon puts energy into tides on earth

Malcolm Sargeant at Quora Visit the source

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To really thoroughly understand the answer here it seems like you need a few things: 1. Potential energy gradients (variations) occur due to variations in the gravitational force on a viscous liquid within or on the moon. 2. These potential energy gradients cause this fluid to flow from one side of the moon to another. The fluid motion causes the fluid to heat up, and if it heats up enough, experience a phase change. So the heating effect is due to the viscous frictional interaction between fluid particles on the moon. So, as these other answers indicate, the fluid flow is indeed caused by potential energy gradients (variations). It is the internal viscous friction of the fluid that causes the fluid to heat up. In summary, the thermal energy comes from nonconservative frictional forces within the flowing viscous fluid and that fluid flows because of variations in the gravitational force on the fluid.

Bert Copsey

The tidal forces that cause the core of a moons to heat up draw energy from  rotation. When all this energy is used up the moon will be "tidally locked" and from that point onward the same side of the moon will face the planet just like our moon always faces the earth. This is also true of the earth, as time goes on the earth's rotational energy is lost due to tidal forces and our days get slowly longer.

John Read

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