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Researchers revealed that the source of a giant earthquake that occurred on Mars was a big surprise.
The earthquake, which was detected 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.”
Fernando explains: “We still believe that Mars does not have any active tectonic plates today, so this event was likely caused by the release of pressure within the Martian crust. 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 detected. Some of them were the result of space rocks colliding with the surface of Mars. Other earthquakes have been linked to magma activity, revealing that the Red Planet is not quite as dead inside as we thought.
Fernando and his colleagues wanted to get to the bottom of the largest earthquake ever recorded by InSight, S1222a: Was it generated internally or externally?
The seismic data appeared similar to previously identified impact events, and other earthquakes were revealed to be due to new, easily identifiable craters and blast zones. So, if S1222a was the result of an impact, the crater and blast areas it left behind should be large and easy to spot.
For the first time, satellites operated by the European Space Agency, the China National Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organization, and the UAE Space Agency have scanned the planet using different instrument clusters to search for a new scar large enough to be the source of S1222a.
The search yielded nothing of the sort. The researchers found that this leaves one main explanation: tectonic movement. This suggests that Mars is likely more seismically active than we thought as well.
The InSight rover is no longer capable of further research, although the data already collected will give scientists food to think about for years to come — and could help future Mars missions and research answer some of the questions raised by this new discovery.
The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
