NASA’s InSight lander has detected seismic activity on Mars, confirming that the planet experiences earthquakes similar to Earth’s due to internal cooling. Despite the potential for a new home on Mars, it is not immune to natural disasters such as earthquakes.
Reports of humans one day building a new home on Mars have been a lot in the news lately, but don’t think that such a move can rid you of all the quirks of Earth. While you may have new ground under your feet, that ground may be just as prone to problems as the one you’re standing on now. In April 2019, NASA confirmed that the Red Planet is susceptible to the same types of earthquakes felt from time to time around the world. The so-called “earthquake” proved what scientists have long assumed: other planets have seismic activity similar to Earth’s. The earthquake cannot be attributed to the type of tectonic shift that causes many earthquakes, but it does show that Mars experiences earthquakes from time to time due to the stress caused by internal cooling. The earthquake was detected by NASA’s InSight robotic lander, which is tasked with studying the deep interior of our planetary neighbor
Lots of shaking going on:
A 1960 earthquake in Chile is the largest earthquake on record; it reached a magnitude of 9.5 on the Richter scale and left an estimated 2 million people homeless.
The Earth experiences about 500,000 earthquakes each year, but only about 100 of them cause damage.
The deadliest earthquake on record killed 830,000 people in Shaanxi, China in 1556.
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