Where the Wild Marsquakes Are – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

The InSight mission to Mars deployed the first-ever seismic station on the Red Planet. During its four-year mission, the station recorded 98 low-frequency events that were interpreted as “marsquakes.” However, it is challenging to locate the source of these earthquakes since only one station is available, and the seismic signals rarely exhibit clear seismic phases. Still, the Marsquake Service (MQS) provides a catalog of marsquakes. Most of these events are located in a north-south band crossing Cerberus Fossae, an area where recent faulting and volcanic activity have been observed from orbital data.

Ceylan et al. [2023] re-evaluated the source locations of these events by using the highest quality events as a template to assign a source region to weaker events. This approach helped overcome the difficulty of identifying weak seismic phases without a clear onset. The study confirmed that Cerberus Fossae is the source region of most marsquakes. It also revealed several new seismicity clusters along the dichotomy between the high-elevation southern hemisphere of Mars and its lower-elevation northern hemisphere. In particular, five events are now located in Western Valles Marineris or at the southern edge of Olympus Mons. The study also identified that S1222a, the largest recorded event, is closer to the dichotomy boundary than originally proposed. Thus, seismic activity on Mars appears more widespread and activates a broader range of tectonic features than originally thought.

Citation: Ceylan, S., Giardini, D., Clinton, J. F., Kim, D., Khan, A., Stähler, S. C., et al. (2023). Mapping the seismicity of Mars with InSight. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 128, e2023JE007826. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JE007826

— Laurent G. J. Montési, Editor in Chief, JGR: Planets

Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Related