2023-10-19 22:45:44
On May 4, 2022, NASA’s InSight space probe, perched on the surface of Mars since 2018, detected the strongest earthquake of all those captured on Mars. The earthquake reached a magnitude of 4.7 and caused vibrations that reverberated across the planet for at least six hours. Now it has been discovered that the cause of that earthquake was not what was believed. The research in which the discovery was made reveals an unexpected facet of the Red Planet and has baffled the scientific community.
As far as is known, Mars today lacks active plate tectonics like Earth does. Therefore, the logical cause of every Martian earthquake is the impact of a sufficiently heavy meteorite against the surface.
Considering that the seismic signal from the May 4, 2022 earthquake was similar to that of previous earthquakes known to have been caused by impacts of cosmic objects, scientists who analyzed the signals generated by the earthquake came to the conclusion that this earthquake, cataloged with the name “S1222a”, was caused by a meteorite impact, stronger than the others, and because of this an international search was organized to find a new crater, excavated by the impact.
The task was not easy. Although Mars is smaller than Earth, its land area is similar to that of Earth because it lacks oceans. To inspect this enormous amount of land (144 million square kilometers), Benjamin Fernando’s team, from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, requested and obtained help from various space agencies that have ships in orbit around Mars examining its surface.
After a long search, the surprise came: there is no new crater. Whatever caused the quake was not an impact.
The highest peak in this spectrogram, obtained from measurements made by the InSight space probe, corresponds to the largest earthquake detected on Mars and on any planet other than Earth: the one on May 4, 2022. (Image: NASA JPL/Caltech/ETH Zurich)
Incredible as it may seem, the earthquake had to be caused by forces internal to Mars. That seems at least the only logical explanation. This implies that the Red Planet is much more geologically active than has been believed. This is difficult to accept, given that today’s Mars lacks plate tectonics like that of Earth.
Perhaps the internal tensions that generated the earthquake are the result of the cooling of the Martian crust and its consequent contraction, over millions of years, and at different rates depending on each area of the planet.
The study is titled “A tectonic origin for the largest marsquake observed by InSight.” And it has been published in the academic journal Geophysical Research Letters. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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