At one time Mars was the home of the seas and oceans and perhaps life. But our neighboring world has long dried up and its atmosphere has blown away, while most of the activities below its surface have long since ceased. It is a dead planet.
Or is it?
Previous research has indicated a volcanic eruption on Mars 2.5 million years ago. But a new paper suggests that only recently, 2,000 years ago, an eruption occurred in an area called Cerberis foci, the youngest known volcanic eruption on Mars. This leads to the possibility of a house below its rusty surface, a huge volcano that has calmed down, with some volcanoes still barely erupting on the surface at intervals.
“If this deposit is volcanic, the Cerberis foci area would not be extinct and Mars could still be active from the volcano today,” scientists scientists from the University of Arizona and the Smithsonian Institution wrote in their paper – which was posted online before the peer review. Has been submitted.
The site of the potential eruption, seen in images of Martian orbit, is near a huge volcano called the Elysium Mons. It is about 1000 miles east of NASA’s Stable Insight Lander, which entered Mars in 2018 to study tectonic activity on the red planet. Looking like a crack in the surface, this feature resembles a recent volatile eruption, where superficial volcanic ash and dust have flooded the surface due to sub-surface volcanic activity. It is similar to the deposits caused by pyroclastic eruptions that scientists have seen on the moon, Mercury and Earth.
The magda below the surface would have reached a height of several miles before the eruption would have returned to the ground. The material is estimated to be 100 times smaller than the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, said Steven Anders, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, who was not included in the paper.
Here is the presence of darkened material, with a symmetrical appearance around its debris, which gives indications at the time of eruption. Known as the fault scarp, this type of feature is “very common in Hawaii” because it causes the magma surface near the volcano to expand and crack, says Robert Craddock of the Smithsonian Institution, co-author of the paper.
By calculating the number of craters appearing around the facility and in the deposit itself, which is around six miles, the team predicts a possible eruption date of 53,000 to 210,000 years ago. The smallest volcano on Mars will erupt.
“I think it’s very exciting,” said Dr. Anderson.
If he could test, the search would have a big impact on Mars. Geologically, there are 53,000 years in the blink of an eye, suggesting that Mars may still be active from a volcano. It could also have major implications for the search for life on Mars.
Such volcanic activity could melt the Earth’s ice, creating a potentially habitable environment for living things.
D life. “You need energy, carbon, water and nutrients to live life,” Anderson said. “And the volcanic system provides it all.”
Activity linked to this site may already be recorded in NASA’s Insight Lander. Using a seismometer, he has measured hundreds of “Marsquakes” or vibrations in the Marting surface. But only two of these have been localized – and both came from Cerberus foci.
“The tectonic activity that is related to volcanic activity is certainly trending,” said Suzanne Smacker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is the Deputy Chief Investigator of the Insight mission.
Insight makes it possible to discover more such activities soon.
“It’s an exciting paper,” Dr. “Understanding today’s activity on Mars is indeed a mystery and the key to investigating its development and habitat.”
Although questions still remain. Lu Pan, a planetary scientist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, is not so sure about the team’s dating method.
“If you want to date a very recent surface, you have to rely on a population of small impact pits.” “And we still have to build this large database of small-impact craters.”
Even in a concise view, the paper’s lead author, David Horvath of the University of Rizwan, said that the eruption would have occurred only a million years ago. That will breathe new life into our understanding of Mars.
“It certainly opens up the possibility that in the deepest depths of the surface, it could be active today,” he said.
