Mars may not be the cold, barren wasteland scientists have long believed — new research shows magma flowing deep beneath the surface of Mars spewed from a volcano over the past 50,000 years.
A team of international scientists, led by ETH Zurich, analyzed a cluster of more than 20 recent Marsquakes, some of which may have been caused by a hot spring that could only be explained by the current molten lava.
With this in mind, the group looked at satellite images of the region and found dark dust deposits more than 5 meters below the surface.
The discovery, if confirmed, fully details the history of Mars suggesting that volcanic activity has been absent for the past four billion years.
Mars was once teeming with volcanic activity, but the last eruption is believed to have happened about four billion years ago. However, a new study could rewrite the history of the Martian world
Simon Staehler, the lead author of the article, said in a: pronunciation: ‘The dark hue of the dust indicates geological evidence of more recent volcanic activity – perhaps within the past 50,000 years – relatively young, in geological terms.’
The team investigated earthquakes in the Cerberus Fossae, a series of semi-parallel fissures on Mars that were formed by faults that pulled the crust apart, using NASA’s Insight lander that arrived on the Red Planet in November 2018.
The team made the discovery using NASA’s Insight lander that arrived on the Red Planet in November 2018. The technology has proven successful in detecting marsquakes
The team investigated earthquakes in the Cerberus Fossae, a series of semi-parallel fissures on Mars formed by faults pulling the crust apart.
Its mission is to discover how a rocky body forms and evolves to become a planet by examining the internal structure and composition of Mars.
And it will also determine the rate of tectonic activity on Mars and meteorite impacts.
Previous research on the Cerberus Fossae has suggested the region was volcanically active for the past 10 million years, but the new discovery could rewrite the timeline.
According to Staehler, “it’s possible that what we see are the last remnants of this once active volcanic area or that the magma is now moving east to the next eruption site.”
Analyzing the quakes, the team discovered a deeper low-frequency marsquake that suggests a structurally weak, potentially warm source region consistent with recent magmatic activity 18 to 31 feet below the surface.
And the study published in Nature notes that the researchers now believe that “Cerberus Fossae represents a unique tectonic environment formed by contemporary magmatic processes and locally increased heat flow.”
“While there is much more to learn, the evidence of potential magma on Mars is intriguing,” Anna Mittelholz, postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich and Harvard University.
Previous research on the Cerberus Fossae has suggested the region was volcanically active for the past 10 million years, but the new discovery could rewrite the timeline.
The groundbreaking discovery comes just months after the Australian National University proposed that the earthquakes are caused by a sea of magma in the Red Planet’s mantle.
Announced in April, this research also analyzed data from Insight, which first arrived on Mars in November 2018, and immediately found that the planet was rumbling.
So far, it has detected hundreds of Marsquakes, but Hrvoje Tkalčić of Australia’s Australian National University and his colleague, geophysicist Weijia Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wanted to look for earthquakes that might have gone undetected in the InSight data.
Using two unconventional techniques, only recently applied to geophysics, the duo discovered 47 new seismic events from an area of Mars called the Cerberus Fossae.
Most resemble the waveforms of two Cerberus Fossae quakes that happened in May and July 2019, suggesting that the smaller quakes are related to the larger ones.
While looking for the cause of the earthquakes, the researchers found that there was no pattern in their timing, which ruled out the Martian moon Phobos having an influence.
“We found that these Marsquakes occurred repeatedly at all times of the Martian day, while Marsquakes detected and reported by NASA in the past appeared to have occurred only in the middle of the night, when the planet is quieter,” Tkalčić said.
“We can therefore assume that the movement of molten rock in the Martian mantle is the trigger for these 47 newly discovered Marsquakes under the Cerberus Fossae region.”