New research has revealed previously undiscovered earthquakes beneath the surface of Mars, which experts believe is evidence that it hosts a sea of magma in its mantle, RT reports. They believe that the best explanation for “Mars earthquakes” is the continuous volcanic activity beneath its dusty and barren surface, and they believe that the planet is more volcanically active and seismic than initially thought.
Experts long believed there wasn’t much going on inside Mars, but researchers at the Australian National University made their discovery following combing through data from NASA’s InSight probe.
“Knowing that the mantle of Mars is still active is critical to our understanding of how Mars evolved as a planet,” said geophysicist Hrvuje Takalić, from the Australian National University. It can help us answer fundamental questions regarding the solar system and the state of Mars’ core, mantle, and evolution of the magnetic field that it currently lacks.
Mars has very little magnetic field, indicating a lack of internal activity. Planetary magnetic fields are typically generated within a planet by something called a dynamo – a rotating, convective, electrically conductive fluid that converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy, and spins a magnetic field into space.
Earth’s magnetic field protects us from cosmic radiation that can destroy life, but radiation levels on Mars are much higher even though the planet is far from the sun. “All life on Earth is possible because of the Earth’s magnetic field and its ability to protect us from cosmic radiation, so without a magnetic field life would simply not be possible as we know it,” Tkalić said.
However, when NASA’s InSight lander arrived in November 2018 and began “taking the pulse of Mars”, it found that the planet was rumbling. So far, it has detected hundreds of Martian earthquakes, but Tkalic and his colleague, geophysicist Wijia Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wanted Find earthquakes that may have gone unnoticed in InSight data.
Using two unconventional techniques, recently applied to geophysics, the duo discovered 47 new seismic events coming from an area on Mars called Cerberus Fossae.
Most of them resemble the waveforms of the two Cerberus Fossae earthquakes that occurred in May and July 2019, suggesting that the smaller quakes are related to the larger ones.
While searching to determine the cause of the earthquakes, the researchers discovered that there was no pattern in their timing, which rules out the influence of the Martian moon Phobos. “We found that these Mars earthquakes occurred frequently at all times of the Martian day, while the Mars earthquakes that NASA detected and reported in the past appear to have only occurred during the night when the planet is quieter,” Tkalić said.
Therefore, we can hypothesize that the movement of molten rock in Mars’ mantle is the driver of these 47 newly discovered earthquakes under the Cerberus Fossae region.
Previous research at Cerberus Fossae has already indicated that the area has been volcanically active for the last 10 million years. And if Mars is more volcanic and seismic than initially thought, the researchers believe, it will change the way scientists look at its past, present and future.
