Talk of humans one day making a new home on Mars has been in the news a lot lately, but don't think that such a move could free you from all of Earth's oddities. While you might have new ground beneath your feet, that ground might be just as prone to problems as the one you're standing on now. In April 2019, NASA confirmed that the Red Planet is susceptible to the same types of quakes felt all over the world from time to time. The so-called "marsquake" proved what scientists have long speculated: Other planets have seismic activity similar to Earth's. The temblor can't be blamed on the kind of tectonic shifting that causes many earthquakes, but it does show that Mars experiences quakes from time to time due to stress caused by interior cooling. The quake was detected by NASA's InSight robotic lander, which is tasked with studying the deep interior of our planetary neighbor
Whole lotta shakin' goin' on:
- A 1960 earthquake in Chile is the largest earthquake ever recorded; it reached a magnitude of 9.5 on the Richter Scale and left about 2 million people homeless.
- The Earth experiences approximately 500,000 earthquakes every year, but only about 100 of them cause damage.
- The deadliest earthquake ever recorded killed 830,000 people in Shaanxi, China, in 1556.