SoylentNews

Enormous Mantle Plume Reveals Mars is Still Geologically Active - ExtremeTech

upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:

████ # This file was generated bot-o-matically! Edit at your own risk. ████

Enormous Mantle Plume Reveals Mars Is Still Geologically Active - ExtremeTech [extremetech.com]:

Mars has a reputation as a cold, dead world, but a new study suggests that may be only partially accurate. Researchers from the University of Arizona have analyzed a region that appears to be geologically boring by Martian standards, finding evidence the mantle is pushing upward, causing fissures, swelling, and quakes. This potential mantle plume could mean Mars [extremetech.com] is much more geologically active than it first appears.

We know that Mars was extremely geologically active in the past, as evidenced by the presence of the tallest volcanoes in the solar system. The planet cooled dramatically between three and four billion years ago, but perhaps it didn’t cool as much as believed. The region in question is known as Elysium Planitia, a flat area of the planet’s northern lowlands. That may sound familiar because that’s where NASA’s InSight [extremetech.com] lander set up shop several years ago to study the planet’s internal structure. And wouldn’t you know it, the probe’s analysis of “marsquakes” shows that almost all of them originate around a series of fissures in Elysium Planitia known as Cerberus Fossae.

The researchers were initially drawn to the region because it shows evidence of more recent geological activity within the last 200,000 years, including an eruption a mere 58,000 years ago. The evidence shows that Elysium Planitia has been uplifted by more than a mile, indicating there is a mantle plume below the surface. A plume is simply a large blob of molten rock that rises from the mantle to the crust, where it can cause faults, quakes, and volcanic activity. The team even found that crater floors in Elysium Planitia are tilted toward the plume, which shows the swelling occurred after those craters were formed.

When applying a tectonic model to the data, the team found a mantle plume was the only plausible explanation [arizona.edu]. Measurements show the plume measures about 2,500 miles across, which would be large even for Earth. It all adds up to a planet that has more going on under the surface than anyone thought. Future studies will have to explore the origins of this apparent mantle plume in a region where no one expected to find one.

While InSight provided invaluable data on the planet’s seismic events, the mission didn’t go exactly to plan. The lander carried a burrowing heat probe that was supposed to take the planet’s temperature, and surely that data would have been of great value in understanding the mantle plume hypothesis. However, the probe was never able to make any progress in the smooth Martian soil. NASA called off the experiment [extremetech.com] in early 2021. InSight itself is expected to go offline [extremetech.com] in the coming weeks as it struggles to collect power with its dusty solar panels.

Now read:

• Asteroid Impact May Have Caused Megatsunami on Mars 3.4 Billion Years Ago [extremetech.com]
• Perseverance Rover Finds Sandstone Bedrock That Could Contain Evidence of Life [extremetech.com]
• NASA’s Mars InSight Lander Lets You Hear the Sound of Meteoroid Impacts [extremetech.com]

Mars May Have a Huge Plume of Hot Rocks Rising Towards its Surface

upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:

████ # This file was generated bot-o-matically! Edit at your own risk. ████

Mars may have a huge plume of hot rocks rising towards its surface [newscientist.com]:

A strange system of trenches on Mars may be hiding an enormous plume of hot rock rising from the planet’s core. This could upend our ideas of Mars as a mostly geologically static world and explain why so many marsquakes start near these fissures, which are known as Cerberus Fossae.

Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics, and after a long period of volcanic activity 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, things have largely been calm there. But recent studies, particularly measurements of marsquakes by NASA’s InSight lander [newscientist.com], have indicated that something strange might be going on at Cerberus Fossae, which is in a region called Elysium Planitia.

Nearly all of the major quakes InSight has measured originated there, and it has felt a low, constant rumble of seismic activity that seems to come from nearby. Other observations have also suggested that the area might have been volcanically active just tens of thousands of years ago, far more recently than anywhere else on Mars.

Advertisement

Adrien Broquet [arizona.edu] and Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna [arizona.edu] at the University of Arizona hypothesised that this could all be explained by a phenomenon called a mantle plume [newscientist.com], in which hot material from near the planet’s core begins to rise through the mantle of the planet, causing shaking and volcanic activity as it goes. “If you were to touch a mantle rock at its mantle temperature and pressure, it would definitively feel solid. But on a million years timescale, it will flow,” says Broquet.

If there is a mantle plume, it ought to press up on the ground atop it, creating a large hill and fracturing the ground. Cerberus Fossae has exactly those characteristics, and computer models of how the area would evolve over time with a mantle plume pressing upwards were an exact match. The models suggested that the plume measures more than 3500 kilometres across and is up to 285 degrees hotter than the surrounding area.

Read more: Bacteria could survive just under Mars's surface for 280 million years [newscientist.com]

“This work provides an important crack in our understanding of Mars as a geodynamically dead planet,” says Sue Smrekar [nasa.gov] at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “It makes a compelling case for a stealthy but active mantle plume beneath Elysium Planitia.”

Not only would that explain why there are so many quakes [newscientist.com] there, it would also solve the long-standing mystery of how the strange landscape of Cerberus Fossae formed. “Having a mantle plume there is the only way to create the fissures that make up Cerberus Fossae,” says Broquet. “If not for this, the region should be in compression as the planet cools and shrinks.”

The heat from a plume would also melt some of the material above it, creating magma that may eventually seep out onto the surface. In fact, the seismic activity detected by InSight is probably related to magma rising through the ground, Broquet says.

That warmth could also be a boon for the potential of life on Mars [newscientist.com]. “The plume may also provide the heat to melt water underground, and I don’t want to be too optimistic, but on Earth this is an environment where microbes flourish,” says Broquet.

Journal reference: Nature Astronomy, DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01836-3 [nature.com]

Sign up to our free Launchpad [newscientist.com] newsletter for a voyage across the galaxy and beyond, every Friday

More on these topics:

• planets
• Mars

Advertisement TrendingLatestVideoFree

1. Amazing image of crescent Earth rising over the moon captured by Orion [newscientist.com]
2. Homo naledi may have used fire to cook and navigate 230,000 years ago [newscientist.com]
3. How did so many giant meat-eating dinosaurs co-exist in the Jurassic? [newscientist.com]
4. Drug that targets ACE2 receptors may work against new covid variants [newscientist.com]
5. A quantum computer has simulated a wormhole for the first time [newscientist.com]

1. Europe’s fastest supercomputer is now connected to a quantum computer [newscientist.com]
2. Homo naledi may have used fire to cook and navigate 230,000 years ago [newscientist.com]
3. From Star Wars to Hitchhiker's – how to make the best drinks in sci-fi [newscientist.com]
4. Adélie penguins show signs of self-awareness on the mirror test [newscientist.com]
5. Amazing image of crescent Earth rising over the moon captured by Orion [newscientist.com]

1. Flying squirrels carve nuts to store them securely in tree branches [newscientist.com]
2. Artemis astronauts prepare for future moon missions in Arizona desert [newscientist.com]
3. Liza Bec: The composer living with music-triggered epilepsy [newscientist.com]
4. Siphonophores' propulsion system is built for speed and efficiency [newscientist.com]
5. Motorless 'Pac Man' bot surfs across water, avoiding objects [newscientist.com]

1. Homo naledi may have used fire to cook and navigate 230,000 years ago [newscientist.com]
2. From Star Wars to Hitchhiker's – how to make the best drinks in sci-fi [newscientist.com]
3. Amazing image of crescent Earth rising over the moon captured by Orion [newscientist.com]
4. COP15 target to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 is ‘unrealistic’ [newscientist.com]
5. Drug that targets ACE2 receptors may work against new covid variants [newscientist.com]

MORE FROM NEW SCIENTIST Ancient megatsunami on Mars traced to the crater where it began Before Mars dried up, an asteroid slammed into one of its oceans and caused a colossal megatsunami, and now researchers have found the crater where it hit Space [newscientist.com] The best non-fiction books of 2022: A feast for the soul From concrete dinosaurs to human evolution, exquisite plants to space travel, we pick the best non-fiction to give to those you love this year Humans [newscientist.com] See the astronauts learning how to walk on the moon... in Arizona These photographs are of JETT3 and D-RATS, two Earth-based missions designed to replicate aspects of future moon landings and help NASA engineers enable astronauts to do science on the lunar surface Space [newscientist.com] How to see Mars disappear behind the moon this December A rare lunar occultation of Mars will be visible from parts of the world this month. Abigail Beall explains how to spot it Space [newscientist.com]

Journal Reference:
Geophysical evidence for an active mantle plume underneath Elysium Planitia on Mars, (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01836-3 [doi.org])

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2