A Quake on Mars Showed Its Crust is Thicker Than Earth's

"Planetary scientists now know how thick the Martian crust is," reports ScienceNews, "thanks to the strongest Marsquake ever observed." On average, the crust is between 42 and 56 kilometers thick [26 to 34 miles], researchers report in a paper to appear in Geophysical Research Letters. That's roughly 70 percent thicker than the average continental crust on Earth.

The measurement was based on data from NASA's InSight lander, a stationary seismometer that recorded waves rippling through Mars' interior for four Earth years. Last May, the entire planet shook with a magnitude 4.7 quake that lasted more than six hours. "We were really fortunate that we got this quake," says seismologist Doyeon Kim of ETH Zurich.

InSight recorded seismic waves from the quake that circled Mars up to three times. That let Kim and colleagues infer the crust thickness over the whole planet. Not only is the crust thicker than that of the Earth and the moon, but it's also inconsistent across the Red Planet, the team found. And that might explain a known north-south elevation difference on Mars.

Re:

[rossdee]

Well its not the Earth that is shaking. So its not an earthquake.

Re:

[Fuck_this_place]

Oh man, all these feelings! I never felt this way before! What do I do?!?

It's like adults are becoming extinct before our very eyes.

Title has mistake.

[Oryan Quest]

Doom was on Mars. Quake was in some other dimension.

Is Venus crust thnnner?

[l810c]

Venue has lots of active volcanos.
It would seem that inner planets will cool over millions of years, further out the sooner.
It may be that Earth will be like Mars in the future and Venus will become habitable.
Going to be a Long Time.

Re:

[youngone]

Mars is cold and has no atmosphere to speak of because of it's lack of a magnetic field. There was a period when it had liquid water on the surface, but the solar wind stripped most of it away.
If Mars was a little bigger, it might have a liquid iron core still, like Earth, and might have kept it's atmosphere as a result.
It fundamentally comes down to poor design.

Re:

[MBGMorden]

Proximity to the sun has little to do with how fast a planet is cooling - its mostly a matter of mass of the planet. Venus only has 82% of the Earth's mass and will have cooled more. Mars only has 11% of the Earth's mass - MUCH faster cooling there.

Also for habitability atmospheric temperature is much much relavant. In that regard the sun started out cooler and as it ages the energy output increases by about 10% every billion years or so - so any habitable period for Venus was in the past not in the futu

It's even thicker

[multatuli]

Given that Mars' diameter is about half Earth's diameter the relative difference is even larger.

Related to the giant-impact hypothesis?

[kiore]

I wonder if the relative thinness of the Earth's crust is related to the giant-impact hypothesis [wikipedia.org] which would suggest that a lot of the crust of both the early Earth & Theia would have been ejected into space?

Another proof

[terrybech]

Another proof of how complicated the idea of a colony on Mars is.