I have to admit, while everyone around here has been “rover this, rover that”, the Mars mission I was most excited about was Insight. It was supposed to burrow a temperature sensor several meters into the ground and deploy a seismograph that would finally answer the question, “Is Mars geologically active?” Geologically active means the world isn’t solid all the way through and is still capable of changing its surface and atmosphere through events ranging from outgassing to volcanism to marsquakes.

While that thermal sensor learned the giant sand trap that is Insight’s resting place on Mars is not good to try and dig in, the seismograph has been returning remarkable data, and in a new paper in Nature Communications, researchers document that Mars is indeed alive.

The two authors of this paper have names that make me really wish people put pronunciation guides on their web pages. We have their names written out on our website and for those of you watching us on tv or YouTube, the names are written below.

In their research, they document 47 new marsquakes that are in the same region as two earlier, high-quality events beneath Cerberus Fossae. This region contains fissures that run alongside each other marking where the crust is pulling apart.

These quakes occurred at all times of day and aren’t caused by tidal effects. The best fit for these shakes is the movement of magma in the upper mantle. According to the paper: The continuous seismicity suggests that Cerberus Fossae is seismically highly active and that the Martian mantle is mobile.

It’s impossible to know if this magma will ever ooze out to the Martian surface or if it will simply keep shaking things up. No matter what happens, this seems to indicate that Mars, or at least the part under Cerberus Fossae, is still very much alive.

More Information

“Repetitive marsquakes in Martian upper mantle,” Weijia Sun & Hrvoje Tkalčić, 2022 March 30, Nature Communications