That has significance for the possibility of liquid water there — and even the potential presence of life. First, some background. Planetary geologists have long thought that the Cerberus Fossae fissures must have formed in lava plains as they cooled and deformed. They can determine a rough age for these plains by counting the number of impact craters, which suggests the region is between , and 2. But the team has found an even younger part of this region near a fissure known as the Cerberus Fossae mantling unit, which is a few tens of kilometers long.
The team studied this region using visible light images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and thermal infrared images from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. These images suggest an eruption has spread lava over an area some 5 kilometers long, to a depth of about 10 centimeters. And the lack of craters suggests all this happened recently, perhaps just 50, years ago. In geological terms, that is brand new. There is another line of evidence that suggests this region could still be active.
Pranabendu Moitra , a research scientist in the UArizona Department of Geosciences, has been probing the mechanism behind the eruption. An expert in similar explosive eruptions on Earth, Moitra developed models to look at the possible cause of the Martian eruption.
In a forthcoming paper in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, he suggests that the explosion either could have been a result of gases already present in the Martian magma, or it could have happened when the magma came into contact with Martian permafrost. He also points out that the youngest volcanic eruption on Mars happened only 6 miles 10 kilometers from the youngest large-impact crater on the planet — a 6-mile-wide crater named Zunil. Several studies have found evidence that large quakes on Earth can cause magma stored beneath the surface to erupt.
The impact that formed the Zunil crater on Mars would have shaken the Red Planet just like an earthquake, Moitra explained. While the more dramatic giant volcanoes elsewhere on Mars — such as Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system — tell a story of the planet's ancient dynamics, the current hotspot of Martian activity seems to be in the relatively featureless plains of the planet's Elysium region.
Andrews-Hanna said it's remarkable that one region hosts the epicenters of present-day earthquakes, the most recent floods of water, the most recent lava flows, and now an even more recent explosive volcanic eruption. The volcanic deposit described in this study, along with ongoing seismic rumbling in the planet's interior detected by InSight and possible evidence for releases of methane plumes into the atmosphere detected by NASA's MAVEN orbiter, suggest that Mars is far from a cold, inactive world, Andrews-Hanna said.
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Copyrights: VolcanoDiscovery and other sources as noted. Use of material: Most texts and images, in particular photographs, on this website are protected by copyright. Intriguingly, this newfound eruption also happened only 6 miles 10 km from the youngest large impact crater on Mars — a meteor crater 6 miles 10 km wide named Zunil.
Prior work found that on Earth, seismic waves from large quakes can force magma stored beneath the surface to erupt. The collision that created Zunil could potentially have shaken Mars like an earthquake, triggering an eruption, Moitra suggested. These new findings raise the possibility the warmth from recent volcanic activity could have made the Red Planet more habitable to life as we know it.
Magma rising from deep underground could have melted ice near the surface, which could have provided favorable conditions for microbial life fairly recently. The big question the scientists now have, Andrews-Hanna said, is "why is this particular area such a hotspot for activity on Mars? Will the next great Martian volcano rise from this spot? The scientists detailed their findings online April 21 in the journal Icarus.
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