Quote:
Originally Posted by RedDevil
Geologically dead does not mean there are no quakes.
There may be no more tectonic movement, no continent drift. But radioactive decay in its core does not stop, fueling local magma flows when the planet as a whole gets solid, nor do buildup and sudden releases of stresses caused by these disappear.
I'd be surprised if any celestial body as young as our solar system and bigger than our moon would have stopped generating quakes already.
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The geologists point to Aluminum-26 as the original source internal radioactive core heat for all the newly-formed Earth, Mars, Venus systems.
We didn't even know Al-26 ever existed until it was discovered in linear accelerator research.
Mars is small. It never had much of anything inside it. And its surface area compared to its mass density ( just like our Moon ) meant that it lost heat quickly, and froze within a billion years of formation.
During the heavy bombardment period, and since, some geologists have hypothesized that impactors could have carried Mar's atmosphere off into space, as a product of dynamics, leaving even less of a heat blanket to conserve what little heat Mars had, accelerating its cooling.
Without volcanoes bringing new carbon dioxide to the surface ( as we enjoy on Earth ), Mars lost another tool with which to battle with thermodynamics.
Without strong tidal forces from its two moons, Mars never experienced the gravitational disruptive 'churning' which does keep some solar system bodies volcanically active.
What would help us, would be to know Mar's tectonic plate boundaries, the location of the MAG-4 epicenter, and the depth of the quake hypocenter ( on the San Andeas Fault, large quake hypocenters are at a depth of six-miles ).
The 2020 World Almanac' listing of 149-major quakes listed only 6 below MAG-6, and none below MAG- 5.5.
MAG-4 has ten times less ten times less released energy than MAG-5, and 31-times less energy.
A MAG-4 quake, while felt indoors by many, would only be felt outdoors by few. And would only be a threat to those living in 'third-world' structures.
Parkfield Village, California has MAG-6 quakes, on average, every 22-years. Their cafe recommends that if patrons feel a quake, that they simply move under their table to finish their steak.