Researchers revealed that the source of a giant earthquake that occurred on Mars was a big surprise. The earthquake, which was discovered by NASA’s InSight vehicle on May 4, 2022, and recorded a magnitude of 4.7, was the result of massive tectonic activity in the Martian crust, according to an international team, led by Planetary physicist Benjamin Fernando from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
“This is unexpected, because Mars does not have tectonic plates.”
“We still believe that Mars does not have any active tectonic plates today, so this event was likely caused by a release of pressure within the Martian crust,” Fernando explains. “These pressures are the result of billions of years of evolution, including expansion and contraction in different parts of the planet at different rates.” InSight spent four years on Mars observing the planet’s interior.
During that period, hundreds of earthquakes and earthquakes were monitored, some of which were the result of space rocks colliding with the surface of Mars, and other earthquakes were linked to magma activity, which reveals that the Red Planet is not completely dead inside as we thought.
