“The Big One”: The Most Powerful Marsquake Ever Detected

On Earth, we understand how and where earthquakes happen due to the discovery of plate tectonics – the continental crust’s creation, movement, and destruction. However, when astronauts placed seismometers on the lunar surface during NASA’s Apollo mission era, those instruments recorded quakes on the Moon. In the 1970s, the Viking landers also recorded quakes on the surface of Mars. Since neither of these worlds has plate tectonics, scientists set about collecting more data to understand the phenomena, which led to the recent NASA InSight lander. Now, a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters explains how the largest recorded seismic event on Mars provided evidence for a different sort of tectonic origin — the release of stress within the Martian crust.

Join communications specialist Beth Johnson as she talks to lead author Benjamin Fernando about the results of an amazing international collaboration that led to this new discovery. (Recorded 16 November 2023.)