Europa may have earth like chemical balance

[todofwar]

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2016/05/17/europas-ocean-may-have-an-earthlike-chemical-balance

Not entirely sure what they mean by this, chemical balance basically means chemistry to me but I'm not a planetary scientist. They say it means life is even more likely than before. 

[PB666]

1 hour ago, todofwar said:

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2016/05/17/europas-ocean-may-have-an-earthlike-chemical-balance

Not entirely sure what they mean by this, chemical balance basically means chemistry to me but I'm not a planetary scientist. They say it means life is even more likely than before. 

Radioactivity and cooling result in volume losses of rock. During accretion the heat and sorting of minerals create chemical disequilibrium whereby siderophiles end up at the bottom and are reactive with oxygen, and the volatiles end up at the top, on the boundaries of energy release and cooler temperatures. Over time the aging of rocks creates a disequilibrium that has available energy, very small amounts, that can but utilized by biotes comparable to archea. This is a lower grade energy source than say deep sea vents, but it does not also rule out the possibility that those vents exist.

Looking at the red trails on the ice it seems to me  that there is alot of reduced metals (iron, manganese, etc) in the water, that are occasionally being pushed through the cracks in the ice to the surface. This is indicative of a weathering process as if there was not weathering these should eventually settle out in clays at the bottom of the sea.

On the issue of earth like, no not exactly, Earth has plants that maintain a redox potential of around 300 mV, that going to probably below -500 mV on Europa. While this doesn't mean there is a major difference at the crack interface, because likely on both cracks are filled with plastic sediment and in both cases the redox in the deep sediments is very low, but as minerals diffuse up the sediment the redox begins to rise and the oxidation state of the minerals change, they precipitate on earth and stay in the sediment.