The Sky Road
Io
The Sky Road
The most volcanic body in the Solar System: Jupiter kneads Io with its tides, and the heat comes out through four hundred volcanoes. The plains are sulfur — yellow, red where it is fresh, white with frost. The pits called paterae hold lakes of lava under plates of dark crust: walk the plates, jump the glowing seams. Plumes stand over the great volcanoes hundreds of blocks high. In the black basalt lies peleite, glass that keeps heat: thermal modules are made of it. In the north lies Loki Patera with an island in its lake. Jupiter hangs in the north and never sets; at midnight the shadow of Io crawls across it.
gravity0.18 gairnone — wear a suitorbit5.204 AU
- Moon of Jupiter
- Day: 42 h
- Volcanoes, sulfur and radiation
Views
Creatures
Structures
Flux Tube Foot
Io and Jupiter are joined by a current of three million amperes; where it comes down, somebody drove masts into the ground. The big one still takes the strike every few seconds, and the ground around it has melted to crust.
Loki's Bell
A bell taller than a house hangs over an island in the lava lake of Loki, and nobody on Io could have cast it. Four stones lie in the moat of lava around it; the frieze on the south of the plinth says in what order to step on them. Mind the steam.
Prometheus Post
A dome of watchers by a volcano that has not gone out since the Voyagers saw it in 1979. They counted its eruptions for a season; then the sulfur snow reached the windows, and they left the seismometer running.
Ores
Events
- Lava Breakout. Fresh lobes of lava creep out of glowing cracks. Keep off the hot crust; where the lava meets frost, it bursts with sulfur
- The Flux Tube. A curtain of aurora sweeps the land. The current strikes those on bare rock: stand on sulfur or jump as it passes
- The Great Eruption. Every volcano of Io goes off at once: the plumes double, sulfur falls like snow, and with it threads of peleite