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Mars is not dead.
NASA announced Thursday that its InSight lander, which investigates geological activity on Mars, recently recorded “two strong and clear earthquakes” in the same region where the lander previously observed two major earthquakes in 2019. This points to a seismically active area on Mars. – a place that appears completely dry and lifeless on its surface, but could be active underground.
“The 3.3 and 3.1 magnitude tremors originated in a region called Cerberus Fossae, further supporting the idea that this location is seismically active,” NASA wrote. The new earthquakes occurred on March 7 and 18.
(These are considered relatively mild earthquakes on Earth, but they are definitely noises that people can feel, depending on how close they are and how deep the earthquake hits.)
Cerberus Fossae is an area of Mars with steep depressions that cut through a landscape of ancient volcanic plains. There is evidence of landslides here, with rocks perhaps dislodged by recurring tremors.
The dome-shaped seismometer on the InSight lander, called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS).
Visible landslides on the steep slopes of Cerberus Fossae.
Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. Of Arizona
The InSight lander has recorded more than 500 earthquakes so far (it landed in November 2018), suggesting that there may indeed be some volcanically active locations in the Martian subsurface, perhaps hot molten rock (magma) moving and flowing like it does on Earth.
The underground magma may even have created the underground lake that planetary scientists detected under the South Pole of Mars in 2018. “You need a heat source,” Ali Bramson, a scientist at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, told Mashable. in 2019. “What could cause that heat source?” Bramson asked. “The only thing we could come up with is an underground magma chamber that had to be active recently.”
Now is the best time to record more Martian earthquakes. On Mars, the winter season in the north can be very windy, causing InSight’s seismometer to vibrate and can make earthquake detection impossible. But now the winds have died down.
“It’s wonderful to see marsquakes again after a long period of wind noise recording,” said John Clinton, a seismologist with the InSight team, in a statement.
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