Something Brewing Under the Martian Surface
“On Earth, the Hawaiian islands were built from volcanoes that erupted as the Earth’s crust slid over a hot spot—a plume of rising magma,” said Jacob Bleacher, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our research raises the possibility that the opposite happens on Mars; a plume might move beneath stationary crust.”
NASA scientists are slowly becoming aware of something odd going on under the surface of Mars and their volcanoes. It has always appeared to by rather calm and placid, with a wind-swept surface that does very little to excite the imagination but the latest research that is combined with satellite imagery of the red planet seem to prove otherwise. Written in “Journal of Geophysical Research, Planets” by Jacob Bleacher and colleagues, the volcanoes on Mars appear to be sleeping giants that are simply dormant instead of stationary magma.
Volcanoes on Mars are beyond huge, with each of them about 186 miles across—Mauna Loa on Earth is the largest one of 60 miles across. The images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express missions seem to suggest the Mars volcanoes that been recently active within the past two million years, and could still be. Impact craters nearby the volcanoes also indicate there may have been recent eruptions. The reason this new find shows the opposite effect between Earth volcanoes and Mars volcanoes, is that up until lately imagey has not been good enough to show the high details which were need to make good comparisons. Basically, what NASA scientists had been doing was to take what knowledge they could gather and compare it to lava flows on Hawaiian volcanoes to discover Mars history. Not!
The only similarity was their formation, but satellite images show that each one had erupted in their own distinct way, allowing the scientists to determine the actual ages of the volcanoes on Mars instead of comparing its growth to that on Earth. What the scientists have found is that “the smoother the apron, the older the eruption.” An apron is the lava that oozes from the volcanic cracks on its side, which forms the lava aprons.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Mission History, Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
