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Science Quickly

"Mars-quakes" Could Reveal How Mars Was Built

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2019

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rumblings on the Red Planet act like x-rays, allowing scientists to probe the hidden interior of Mars. Christopher Intagliata reports.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visitacolkot.co.j.p.

0:23.9

That's y-A-K-U-L-T-C-O-J-P.

0:28.4

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.7

This is Scientific American's 60-second science.

0:37.2

I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

0:39.1

Just like here on Earth we have earthquakes, the planet Mars has Marsquakes.

0:44.2

Although the quakes that we see on Mars are actually more similar to the kinds of things you see in the middle of plates on the Earth, what we call intra-plate earthquakes.

0:52.1

And so something that might happen in Montana or

0:56.3

South Carolina, for example. Bruce Banner, a planetary geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California.

1:03.0

He explains that as the hot center of the planet cools, it's slowly shrinking. So the frozen outer layers,

1:09.3

basically, after a while, they're too big for the rest of

1:13.0

the globe, and they have to kind of crinkle to kind of stay contiguous on a shrinking ball.

1:18.2

And that crinkling causes quakes. NASA's Insight mission, which landed on the red planet about a

1:23.5

year ago, placed a seismometer on the planet's surface to listen for quakes, and it's captured

1:28.4

signals from more than a hundred, some large enough that you'd feel them if you were standing

1:32.7

nearby, like this magnitude 3.7 recorded back in May.

1:38.7

Just to note that it's been sped up to be audible, and you really need headphones to hear

1:43.2

the ferocious rumbling.

1:48.5

We use these signals from the Marsquakes, actually to probe the deep interior of Mars.

...

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