But the liquid is hydrogen, not water. We can tell by its mass that Jupiter is mostly hydrogen, but the conditions of temperature and pressure there are so extreme that most of our concepts of solid/liquid/gas don’t apply. The atmosphere we see is a very thin skin atop a massive sphere of material in conditions we can’t even duplicate in earth laboratories. And these conditions vary enormously as we go towards the center.

I’ve even heard speculation that the planet might have a core of crystalline hydrogen behaving like a superconductor (hence the extravagant magnetic field).

I assumed color enhancement, especially in the first pic of the Jovian pole. However, the rest of that image that is not blue does not look color enhanced.

I’m just speculating, but I’d guess what we’re seeing is a highly stratified atmosphere with different colored compounds predominant at every layer, but strong thermal convective currents are bringing up material from below, and before it has a chance to mix the different gases flow around like multiple paints being mixed. Still, these are gases, not liquids, you would expect them to rapidly mix but they don’t. They maintain separation, as if they had different viscosities and temperatures, even surface tensions and densities.

I recall seeing this effect in other images of Jupiter, but I imagined as we zoomed in we would eventually start seeing more mixing and blending at the boundaries. Instead, we see more and more fine structure and detail in the cloud tops the closer we go in. When does it stop?

We really need to send a probe into the atmosphere, taking pictures all the way, until it gets too dark to see anything. Would we eventually see cumulus-like upwellings, stratus-like layers, wisps of cirrus crystals? Right now they just don’t look like clouds, although I would guess we’re too far out to see them individually, if they’re there at all.