Talk:List of largest lakes and seas in the Solar System

Tweak subject definition?
Perhaps we should change the description of the subject to "single bodies of water or other liquid on the surface of a solid body (terrestrial planet or moon) or bodies of liquid water within them." Otherwise, internal bodies of liquid such as the Earth's outer core and bodies of magma would also fit. WolfmanSF (talk) 05:40, 13 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I changed it to "near the surface". It's not necessary for the liquid to be water. I suppose magma chambers on Io would count, but we don't actually know of any.  — kwami (talk) 06:17, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
 * But "near the surface" does not really work either. Some of the theorized liquid-water oceans may be under several hundreds of kilometers of ice and if there are several stacked layers, then the lower layers are located even deeper, which would hardly be "near the surface". Earth's crust is typically 5–10 km (oceanic crust) or 30–50 km thick. The upper part of the mantle is apparently basically solid too (and thus grouped into the lithosphere), but below ~200 km, it becomes significantly more plastic (but apparently not properly liquid). Would plastic count, or would this be an appropriate reason for excluding it here? --JorisvS (talk) 16:17, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Caspian Sea
Should it be described as the second largest ocean? If not, why is it listed? WolfmanSF (talk) 05:13, 16 April 2014 (UTC)


 * That would work too. If we count bodies of water rather than basins (hydrostatic rather than geological), it's both, as the Black Sea is lumped in with the Ocean Sea anyway.  — kwami (talk) 06:34, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Mentioning "dwarf planet"
What do you mean "consistent"? Consistent with what?

"if we identify some dwarf planets, we should identify all of them"—we can't because our knowledge about them is very limited, that's why we have list of possible dwarf planets. Or do you mean something else?

"note that the mass ranges of planets and dwarf planets don't overlap"—How does this matter? --JorisvS (talk) 09:52, 3 October 2015 (UTC)


 * As you may have noticed, before my edit two of the 4 listed objects recognized as dwarf planets were denoted as such, and two were not, which is inconsistent. I rectified this. If we decide we don't need to denote any of the recognized dwarf planets as such, fine, at least let's be consistent. My comment that the mass ranges of planets and dwarf planets don't overlap was in rebuttal to your claim that the listed planets, dwarf planets and moons are all in the same mass range. WolfmanSF (talk) 10:14, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I didn't. I didn't notice that Ceres had and kept its mention as "dwarf planet". And I never claimed that their masses overlap, I claimed that they are all planetary-mass objects, which is true: All have sufficient mass to be round, which is necessarily the case. No irregular object can have liquids. So anything that orbits in a belt necessarily is a dwarf planet. We can note this for the readers' convenience in the text, but there is no need to make this explicit in the table. --JorisvS (talk) 11:26, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Rhea's interior
A recent paper on Rhea's gravity field and interior: states that "In spite of the improved determination of Rhea’s gravity field, the significant uncertainties in shape prevent us from drawing strong conclusions about the interior structure. In particular, neither undifferentiated nor fully-differentiated structures can be excluded." This suggests that the possibility of internal liquid water is still open. WolfmanSF (talk) 08:29, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Ceres' interior
A recent article on Ceres: concludes that "fluids may exist at depth on Ceres today". WolfmanSF (talk) 08:42, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Lake Michigan versus Superior
Why is Lake Michigan listed as the third largest body of water on Earth? Lake Superior is larger, both in terms of area and volume. 2601:642:4C02:9881:8BA:A981:F1B3:955 (talk) 04:23, 16 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are in fact one singular lake separated by a narrow channel; their combined area (as Lake Michigan-Huron) is greater than that of Lake Superior ArkHyena (talk) 07:28, 25 March 2024 (UTC)