This is

This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Just like here on Earth we have earthquakes.

The planet Mars has Marsquakes.

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.

And so something that might happen in Montana or South Carolina for example.

Bruce Banner, a planetary geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California.

He explains that as the hot center of the planet cool it's slowly shrinking.

So the frozen outer layers basically after a while they're too big for the

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

And that crinkling causes quakes.

NASA's Insight Mission, which landed on the red planet about a year ago,

placed a seismometer on the planet's surface

to listen for quakes, and it's captured signals

from more than a hundred, some large enough

that you'd feel them if you were standing nearby,

like this magnitude 3.7 recorded back in May.

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

ferocious rumbling.

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

They act almost like x-rays. They know they pass through the planet they bounce off

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