Africa-Press – Sierra-Leone. Earth isn’t the only world in our solar system with volcanoes and earthquakes: Mars, Venus, and many of the larger planets’ moons have also been observed shaking, twisting, cracking, and spewing lava or other internal contents onto their surface as well.
A marsquake tracked by Earth scientists earlier this year has had its power quantified for the first time, and the results are off the scales. Clinton was part of a team of seven scientists who published an article on the event in Geophysical Research Letters on Wednesday.
They found that the May marsquake was actually slightly weaker in intensity than previously believed – magnitude 4.7 versus magnitude 5.0 reported at the time – but lasted for roughly 10 hours, making it much stronger overall than any previously detected marsquake. The previous record holder released only one-fifth of the energy, by comparison.
On Earth, a magnitude 4.7 earthquake is rarely something to write home about, but on Mars, which doesn’t have the same degree of tectonic activity as the Earth, it’s a pretty big deal. The red planet doesn’t even have tectonic plates like Earth does, or a dynamic molten interior like the Earth’s. As a result, Mars also has almost no magnetic field. It is believed to have possessed nearly all of these features in the distant past, however.
Humans have dispatched a number of probes to study the planet, which has long occupied the imaginations of human observers. Several rovers are wandering the Martian surface, studying aspects of the surface and the atmosphere up-close, while orbital probes observe planetary properties from a wider point of view. In June, the Chinese Tianwen-1 orbiter completed its photography of the entire Martian surface – the latest in several such efforts since the 1970s.
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