Jupiter's moon Europa could be a potential habitat for life after a body of liquid water trapped in the moon's icy surface has been discovered.

The newly discovered lake which is similar to the North American Great Lakes, is covered by floating ice shelves that are on the verge of collapsing, according to the study led by scientists from the University of Texas at Austin.

"Now we see evidence that even though the ice shell is thick, it can mix vigorously. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable," said Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics, who is the lead author of the study.

Using images taken from the Galileo spacecraft, the scientists focused on two circular, bumpy features on Europa's surface called chaos terrains and using similar processes on Earth, they developed a model to explain how the features form on Europa.

Hundreds of these formations are spread across Europa's icy surface and new studies of ice formations in Antarctica and Iceland have provided clues to the creation of these puzzling features, which imply water nearer to the moon's surface than previously thought.

While they believe their model is correct, the researchers said that confirmation of the presence of the lake can only be made in a future spacecraft mission designed to probe the ice shell.

NASA is currently studying such mission which has been rated as the second highest mission by the National Research Council's recent Planetary Science Decadal Survey.

"This new understanding of processes on Europa would not have been possible without the foundation of the last 20 years of observations over Earth's ice sheets and floating ice shelves," said Don Blankenship, a co-author and senior research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics.

Funded by the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, the Vetlesen Foundation and NASA, the research paper appeared in the journal Nature.