November 6, 2022
By Zubi
Researchers have analyzed and shown several recent tremors on the Red Planet.
that these marsquakes are probably caused by magma rising deep beneath the surface of Mars.
This is evidence that Mars is still volcanically active, researchers report October 27 in Nature Astronomy.
Since landing on Mars four years ago, NASA's InSight lander has detected more than 1,000 marsquakes (SN: 11/26/18).
Its seismometer records seismic waves, which reveal information about the size and location of an earthquake.
Previous studies have determined that many marsquakes originated from a swath of Martian terrain known as Cerberus Fosse.
This region, which is particularly riddled with faults, is more than 1,000 kilometers away from the InSight lander.
But until now most of the marsquakes associated with Cerberus Fosse are pretty familiar scientifically, says planetary scientist Anna Mittelholz.
Their seismic waves, which tend to be of low frequency, "are those that look much higher than what we see for earthquakes," she says.
Mittelholz and his colleagues have now analyzed a large sample of marsquakes, including more than 1,000 high-frequency earthquakes.