Mars Is Rumbling With Mysterious Quakes We’ve Never Detected Before

It turns out that Mars is rumblier than we knew. New techniques have revealed previously undetected quakes beneath the Martian surface – and, scientists say, the best explanation so far is ongoing volcanic activity.

The evidence seems to be mounting that Mars is far from dead, but hosts, underneath its dusty, barren surface, an interior gurgling away with seismic activity.

“Knowing that the Martian mantle is still active is crucial to our understanding of how Mars evolved as a planet,” says geophysicist Hrvoje Tkalčić of the Australian National University in Australia.  

“It can help us answer fundamental questions about the Solar System and the state of Mars’ core, mantle, and the evolution of its currently-lacking magnetic field.”

For a very long time, scientists believed that nothing much was going on inside Mars.

The planet has very little in the way of a magnetic field. Planetary magnetic fields are (usually) generated inside the planet, by something called a dynamo – a rotating, convecting, and electrically conducting fluid that converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy, spinning a magnetic field out into space.

Mars’ lack of a magnetic field suggests a lack of activity. This is a big deal; in fact, a magnetic field can mean the difference between life and death. Here on Earth, the magnetic field protects us from cosmic radiation that might destroy life. On Mars, radiation levels are much higher, even though it is more distant from the Sun.

“All life on Earth is possible because of the Earth’s magnetic field and its ability to shield us from cosmic radiation, so without a magnetic field life as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible,” Tkalčić explains.

But when NASA’s InSight lander arrived in November 2018 and started listening for Mars’ heartbeat, we learnt something really remarkable: Mars is rumbling. To date, InSight has detected hundreds of marsquakes – enough to give us a detailed map of the Martian interior.

Tkalčić and his colleague, geophysicist Weijia Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wanted to look for quakes that might have gone unnoticed in the InSight data. They used two unconventional techniques, only recently applied to geophysics, to hunt seismic events in the InSight data.

Based on nine templates of known marsquakes, the pair detected 47 new seismic events, coming from a region on Mars called the Cerberus Fossae – a system of fissures created by faults that have pulled the crust apart.  …