Back in March, NASA’s InSight lander
detected two large quakes from a geologically active region of Mars called the Cerberus Fossae. Now, using imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which circles the red planet at an altitude of about 300km, researchers have discovered that the Cerberus Fossae region holds the most recent evidence of volcanic activity ever seen on Mars.
The newly observed volcanic deposit could have been created as recently as 46,000 years ago, though outer estimates suggest that, at the oldest, it might be 200,000 years old. In either case, on geological time scales, this is a very young deposit. Most of the volcanic rock elsewhere on Mars is orders of magnitude more ancient, forming during a period of heavy geological activity between 3 and 4 billion years ago. More recent volcanic eruptions occurred with regularity on Mars up to about 3 million years ago, but until now, we have never seen any evidence of volcanism that can be dated in the thousands of years. This new deposit is unique. As lead researcher David Horvath from the Planetary Science Institute
explains, “if we were to compress Mars geologic history into a single day, this would have occurred in the very last second.”
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