Mars’ interior is more chaotic than Earth’s

The largest quakes detected by InSight, indicated
by the red dots.
Using archival quake data from the Mars lander InSight, scientists now believe that the upper layers in the interior of the red planet are not as coherently layered as the Earth’s, that its mantle is broken up in a much more chaotic manner. From the paper’s abstract:
We report the discovery of kilometer-scale heterogeneities throughout Mars’ mantle, detected seismically through pronounced wavefront distortion of energy arriving from deeply probing marsquakes. These heterogeneities, likely remnants of the planet’s formation, imply a mantle that has undergone limited mixing driven by sluggish convection. Their size and survival constrain Mars’ poorly known mantle rheology, indicating a high viscosity.
These “heterogeneities” are large blocks of material, some as large as two to three miles wide, that are thought left over from the planet’s initial formation. These initial pieces of the mantle were layered like the Earth, but subsequent impacts during the accretion process cracked them and shifted them about.
These results have some uncertainty, as so far only one seismometer, InSight’s, has be placed on Mars. It will require more sensors and years of data to fully map the interior with greater precision and reliability.
The largest quakes detected by InSight, indicated
by the red dots.
Using archival quake data from the Mars lander InSight, scientists now believe that the upper layers in the interior of the red planet are not as coherently layered as the Earth’s, that its mantle is broken up in a much more chaotic manner. From the paper’s abstract:
We report the discovery of kilometer-scale heterogeneities throughout Mars’ mantle, detected seismically through pronounced wavefront distortion of energy arriving from deeply probing marsquakes. These heterogeneities, likely remnants of the planet’s formation, imply a mantle that has undergone limited mixing driven by sluggish convection. Their size and survival constrain Mars’ poorly known mantle rheology, indicating a high viscosity.
These “heterogeneities” are large blocks of material, some as large as two to three miles wide, that are thought left over from the planet’s initial formation. These initial pieces of the mantle were layered like the Earth, but subsequent impacts during the accretion process cracked them and shifted them about.
These results have some uncertainty, as so far only one seismometer, InSight’s, has be placed on Mars. It will require more sensors and years of data to fully map the interior with greater precision and reliability.