Mars is made up of a single plate.relatively inactive mantle.
One of the goals of NASA's InSight lander isdetection and measurement of the planet's seismic activity. Therefore, a few weeks after landing, he installed a seismometer on the surface of Mars. The seismometer registered everything from Martian earthquakes to meteorite impacts, even picking up vibrations caused by Martian dust storms. InSight found about 1,300 tremors - that's about one earthquake per day. For comparison, terrestrial seismometers register from 500 thousand to 1 million earthquakes every year.
Most marsquakes are small, with a magnitudefrom one to three. The largest, recorded in early May, had a magnitude of five points. But quakes are hard to detect because they are small and often get lost in the noise. The wind acting on the seismometer may be enough to drown them out. Therefore, scientists used a new method to detect tremors that had previously gone unnoticed.
Considering all the data, not individual events,scientists were looking for common features common to marsquakes. One method, the so-called “matched filter method” (which allows known signals to be distinguished from noise in the spectrogram), allowed them to identify events as earthquakes because they had similar waveforms to other earthquakes. Thus, the researchers were able to detect 47 new low-frequency earthquakes using InSight.
"The fact that Mars has a single plate is notmeans that this plate is homogeneous,” explains Tkalchich. “It could have plate deformation in the middle due to convection in the mantle, say, an updraft of hot material that could cause plate deformation. In this way, you can get tectonic earthquakes - in the sense that they are associated with plate dynamics.
However, these low-frequency events seem togrouped. When one thing happens, others will surely follow. "The recurring nature of the newly discovered events strongly suggests their connection with magmatic events," Tkalchich said.
This means that these small earthquakesmay be caused by the movement of magma inside Mars, which caused the surprise of scientists. This discovery may indicate that the mantle of Mars is more dynamic than previously thought.
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