With the recent wave of attention to the new Mars rover, everyone’s at least had the planet on their radar recently. And recently we got some exciting news about the Red Planet, although it didn’t come from the rover Curiosity.
Instead, we learned from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that Mars has tectonic plate activity much like that found on Earth. Over 100 satellite images beamed back indicate that Mars has fault lines similar to those in California, the Himalayas, or Tibet.
How do Tectonic Plates Work?
Tectonic plates are giant pieces of the outer layer of a planet, pieces that essentially float around the core of a planet. These giant pieces of crust move around — grinding against each other to create earthquakes, pushing into each other to raise mountains, and generally rearranging the surface of the planet.
Martian plate tectonics are slightly different, though, according to recent findings. It appears they are localized, and occur only in a specific area of the crust, rather than all over the surface of the planet.
Does Mars Have Earthquakes?
An Lin, a professor from UCLA, has analyzed the new findings, and he concludes that yes, Mars does have earthquakes.
He says, though, that the tectonic plates are mainly left over from a period of greater activity. They still wake up and slide against each other, gradually transforming the crust of Mars, but it probably only happens over a long duration — “perhaps every million years or more.”
The Implications for Life
Lin also says that tectonic plate activity makes it much more likely for Mars to have had life at some point in the past.
Volcanoes, earthquakes, and other operations of plate tectonics recycle the major chemical constituents of life. The exchange between the deep mantle of the planet and its atmosphere is made much more “dynamic, rapid, and interactive,” creating more favorable conditions for life to exist.
In fact, it’s been theorized that plate tectonics are even more important to alien life than “habitable zones” around a sun. In the past, we’ve often check other stars to see if they had planets at a distance that would support liquid water — not so hot that it all steams away, and not so cold that it freezes.
But scientists are starting to realize that many other planets could support liquid water and the right mixture of organic chemicals simply from their own tectonic activity and inner heat.
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