Most quakes on Mars happen during the summer – and we don’t know why

Thousands of mystical earthquakes on Mars that occur only during the summer are different from known earthquakes, mysterious scientists.

NASA’s Insight Lander reached Mars in 2018, recording thousands of Marsquakes, including surprisingly large earthquakes that showed the planet being more globally active than we originally thought.

now, Simon Steller The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and his colleagues have discovered thousands of curious Marscakes detected by insights that are different from those we have discovered on Earth. These earthquakes shake the planets with similar intensity each time, and only occur during the summer months on Mars. “None of these are normal,” Steller told the Moon and Planetary Science Conference held in Texas on March 10. “That’s not what you expect.”

Earthquakes appear to occur only north of Mars, shaking the planet 10 times a day at peak times before halting for the rest of the year. Stähler and his team saw this pattern during the second consecutive summer on Mars. The second summer had twice the earthquake that first occurred.

The clustered timing is “the strangest thing about these earthquakes,” Stähler said. On Earth, the only mechanism we know about such seasonal earthquakes is the increase in rainfall, which temporarily changes the composition of rocks. But there is no liquid water on the surface of Mars, so it is not possible to see why these earthquakes are occurring, Steller said.

Earthquakes also tend to follow a pattern of approximately 10 times less than weaker ones as they gradually become stronger on the Richter scale. However, there is an even more dramatic pattern in these Martian earthquakes. The strongest were 100-1000 times less frequently than the weaker ones.

“The real mystery, and the part that makes this very exciting is the seasonality.” Michael Soli at Purdue University, Indiana. Mars has seasonal processes such as carbon dioxide-based ice that grow and retreat each year, and are linked to avalanches, says Soli.

However, these avalanches are unlikely to explain, as they are far from where Marsquakes was detected. “Maybe there’s some kind of seasonal process that includes carbon dioxide ice somewhere else that could become part of the answer,” says Soli.