The moon, slightly smaller than the one orbitting Earth, has one of the youngest surfaces in the Solar System, implying "rapid recycling", said the team.
They found evidence that a piece of the surface had disappeared along a boundary between two ice plates, possibly when one sunk under the other.
They took this as evidence of surface material being recycled into the moon's interior -- similar to parts of Earth's crust which sink into the underlying mantle at so-called subduction zones where tectonic plates converge.
The team had studied an area of 134,000 square kilometres (51,700 square miles), using the images and a reconstruction of geological features.
They found that a 20,000 km2-portion of surface was missing.
"We propose that Europa's ice shell has a brittle, mobile, plate-like system above convecting warmer ice," they wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
"Hence, Europa may be the only Solar System body other than Earth to exhibit a system of plate tectonics."
Europa is one of the four largest moons of Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in our Solar System.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They found evidence that a piece of the surface had disappeared along a boundary between two ice plates, possibly when one sunk under the other.
They took this as evidence of surface material being recycled into the moon's interior -- similar to parts of Earth's crust which sink into the underlying mantle at so-called subduction zones where tectonic plates converge.
The team had studied an area of 134,000 square kilometres (51,700 square miles), using the images and a reconstruction of geological features.
They found that a 20,000 km2-portion of surface was missing.
"We propose that Europa's ice shell has a brittle, mobile, plate-like system above convecting warmer ice," they wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
"Hence, Europa may be the only Solar System body other than Earth to exhibit a system of plate tectonics."
Europa is one of the four largest moons of Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in our Solar System.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------