Cosmic Catastrophe

[freebeard]

Shakes so much it leaves a trail of dust.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Mars recently had an an uptick in quakes to include an M4 quake that lasted over an hour. Yep sounds geologically dead to me.
If it's geologically dead then how can there be an uptick in geological activity.

* an earthquake is a seismic event, right?
* seismic events are measured with seismometers, right ?
* anything that rattles a planet will show up on a seismometer ( on Earth, seismic activity produced by trucks and heavy equipment is recorded all day and night ).
* Mars has virtually no atmosphere.
* seismic activity could be explained by a non-ablated impactor striking the planet at over a hundred-thousand mph, depending on its direction.
* seismic waves travel around, are internally reflected, reverberate, and are ultimately attenuated over time as they peter out.
* an M4 'signal' is a logarithmic 'amplitude' ,not a signature of some specific anomaly.
* 'signals' are agnostic.
* The 'source' of the signal is not defined by the 'signal.'
* was the M4 signal 'constant' for over an hour, or was this a mean average magnitude, cascading lower and lower over that time period?

[oil pan 4]

Mars is being photographed regularly by orbiter, if there was an impactor big enough to cause an hour long M4 quake it would have been found quickly.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by aerohead

* an earthquake is a seismic event, right?

Yes, and so is a Mars-quake.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Mars is being photographed regularly by orbiter, if there was an impactor big enough to cause an hour long M4 quake it would have been found quickly.

* geosynchronous orbit, or 'circling' orbit ?
* would the satellite have ' been there' at the moment of impact to see it ?
* what is the size of a 'metallic' meteorite massive enough to create an M4 signal?
* what is the size of a 'rocky' meteorite massive enough to create an M4 signal?
* are these two 'sizes' within the resolving power of the satellite recording instruments?
* on Earth, a single seismic event can trigger a 'swarm' of seismic events, which continue to 'ripple' along after the initial brittle-rupture event.
* an again, are we talking about an average seismic amplitude over the duration of one-hour, or a 'constant' seismic amplitude?

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Yes, and so is a Mars-quake.

So, it's a fact that, as with Earth, a Mars-quake can have an origin which has nothing to do with volcanism or tectonic activity.
Bam Bam and Pebbles strike Mars with clubs, and it shows up on the Richter scale.

[freebeard]

Found this:

Mission to a Comet | NASA
https://www.nasa.gov › mission_pages › deepimpact › mission › index.html
Deep Impact, a NASA Discovery Mission, is the first space mission to probe beneath the surface of a comet and reveal the secrets of its interior. Artist's concept of Deep Impact. On July 4, 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft arrives at Comet Tempel 1 to impact it with a 370-kg (~820-lbs) mass.

They didn't have a seismic reading from that*, but we know that the Moon rings like a bell.

(Also, the S0 reports there was an upward lightning bolt at the La Palma volcano)

*The visible white electrical flash was [mis]attributed to "talcum powder' dust. Dust, the thing they think is 'Dark Matter' out beyond the Oort Cloud.

[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.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Found this:

They didn't have a seismic reading from that*, but we know that the Moon rings like a bell.

(Also, the S0 reports there was an upward lightning bolt at the La Palma volcano)

*The visible white electrical flash was [mis]attributed to "talcum powder' dust. Dust, the thing they think is 'Dark Matter' out beyond the Oort Cloud.

1) Everything has a natural frequency, and harmonics ( octaves ).
2) Volcano lightning is pretty common. Ground-to-sky discharges are a normal component of all lightning strikes.
3) Dust doesn't have enough mass to explain the angular momentum orbital discrepancies associated with 'missing mass'. And dust, just a few degrees above zero-Kelvin, can be seen in sub-millimeter radio-photons by radio telescopes. Astronomers are working towards space-based, Very Large Baseline Interferometers, larger than Earth ( we already have Earth-sized VLBI ), which will have the resolving power ( resolution ) to 'see' some of what presently escapes us. We already have an ever-increasing catalog of 'dark matter' maps. And we've 'photographed' the first black hole. These objects, some of thousand-solar masses, have the kind of 'substance' which may explain a few things.
They'll be looking for the hologram on the event horizon, which explains the contents of the information which defines the constituents residing beyond. Frozen time could be rather 'heavy.'

[aerohead]

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.

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.