NASA's Cassini records a Hurricane in Saturn churning up ice water

The storm, with vertical winds of 500 kilometres an hour, reached hundreds of kilometres down into Saturn's hot lower atmosphere, scooping up water vapour and throwing it high into the cold upper atmosphere, where it froze and was detected as water ice.

"We think this huge thunderstorm is driving these cloud particles upward, sort of like a volcano bringing up material from the depths and making it visible from outside the atmosphere," said Lawrence Sromovsky of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study.



Credit: NASA, Wired