Of the strange and unexplained terrains in our solar system, the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is among the most perplexing.

Enceladus is an ocean world, with a vast and briny sea tucked beneath its icy crust; this makes it one of the most tantalizing places in the solar system to look for life beyond Earth. But unlike other frozen moons, Enceladus constantly erupts. The tiny world blasts salty water into space through cracks in its crystalline shell. These fissures, raked across the moon’s southern pole, are roughly parallel and evenly spaced. And ever since scientists first took a good look at this alien moon, they’ve had a tough time explaining those “tiger stripes.”

“What is going on?” said Doug Hemingway of the Carnegie Institution for Science. “In a way, it’s an obvious question — it’s been in the back of everyone’s mind for a long time.”

Now, Dr. Hemingway and his colleagues think they know how the moon got its stripes — and, curiously, why the stripes are found only at the Enceladian south pole. They described their hypothesis Monday in Nature Astronomy. Learning more about how extraterrestrial oceans on worlds such as Enceladus evolve and interact with planetary surfaces is important for understanding how life might exist beyond Earth and how we might find it, Dr. Hemingway said.