A mass of moving material on Mars called a mantle plume may be causing marsquakes and volcanism
Geologically, that is. Smaller than Earth, the planet would have cooled faster than ours after it formed. It was, for a time, quite volcanically active. However, as the thinking goes, when the interior temperature gradually dropped, so too did the planet’s ability to generate large-scale geologic activity—such as huge volcanoes and marsquakes.
Mars was once a heavily volcanic planet. The surface is still dotted with these ancient mounds, including one called Olympus Mons. This monster is over 600 kilometers in diameter—roughly equal to the length of the state of Colorado—and towers 21 kilometers above the average surface elevation of its planet, about two and half times as high as Mount Everest. Though other volcanoes on Mars are smaller, they are still huge, and terribly old.
Moreover, in 2018, NASA’s InSight lander touched down on Mars in a region called Elysium Planitia, about 1,600 kilometers from Cerberus Fossae. A mission to help measure what’s going on under the Martian surface, InSight has a seismometer that has detected hundreds of small marsquakes over the past few years, and several that were fair-to-middling in energy. The overwhelming majority of them appear to have come from the direction of Cerberus Fossae.
The curveball here is that much of the mantle of Mars is actually solid; it’s a misconception that it’s a liquid. But convection can work even in a solid. The silicate material making up the bulk of a mantle is crystalline, and there can be flaws and breaks in the crystal pattern. Under the huge pressures deep underground, atoms from the material below can fill in these cracks in the structure in a process called dislocation creep.
The scientists used computer models to simulate the geophysics of Mars, and found that a plume some 95–285 degrees Celsius hotter and slightly less dense than the surrounding mantle centered almost directly under the fossae would do the trick. It would form a cap spread out over about 2,500 kilometers, and push the crust up about a kilometer, again matching Cerberus Fossae.
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