How ancient volcanoes on Mars are rewriting Earth’s history

Moose volcanoes are a common feature in surfaces of solid planets inside the solar system.

They take place as a result magmatic activity that occurs in the planetary crust. On Earth, volcanism is primarily driven by the recycling of heat and crust associated with plate tectonics, but Mars lacks tectonic plates and the driver of volcanism is not well understood.

AND investigation recently created by a teacher Josef Michalski, geologist from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has revealed interesting information about volcanic activity on Mars.

This is suggested by an expert Mars has significantly more diverse volcanism than previously thought, driven by an early form of crustal recycling called vertical tectonics. The findings, recently published in Nature Astronomy, shed light on the ancient crust of Mars and their potential implications for understanding early crustal recycling on both Mars and Earth.

It is traditionally known Mars has large shield volcanoes similar to those of Hawaii. However, it was not known that Mars also has various explosive volcanoes that form on Earth due to the recycling of the Earth’s crust.

Recent research by Professor Michalský and his international team reveals a a large number of different volcanoes in the ancient crust of Mars. “We’ve known for decades that Mars has volcanoes, but most known volcanoes correspond to large basalt shield volcanoes similar to those that make up Hawaii,” he explains.

“We show it in this work The ancient crust has many other types of volcanoes, such as lava domes, stratovolcanoes, calderas, and large ash shields, not lava. “In addition, most scientists consider Mars to be a planet composed of basalt, which is low in silica and represents little evolution of the Earth’s crust, but these volcanoes are high in silica, which means that they were formed by a complex process of magma development that was not previously known,” he adds. . .

The investigation indicates that there was a intense volcanism on ancient Mars, which caused the crust to collapse into the mantle where the rocks remelted resulting in high-silica magmas.

This is meant to be A tectonic process called vertical tectonics took place on ancient Earth, but the rocks on Earth from this period (Archean, over 3 billion years ago) have been greatly altered by subsequent geological activity, so that we cannot clearly see evidence of this process on this planet.

Therefore, exploring other planets such as Mars, which has volcanism but not plate tectonics, may help to reveal the secret of the early recycling of the Earth’s crust both on the Red Planet and, by analogy, on early Earth.

Professor Michalski concluded: “Mars contains critical geological features that help us understand not only this planet, but also Earth. “Martian volcanism is much more complex and diverse than previously thought.”

“This is an important discovery because it revealed that crustal recycling can occur not only in plate tectonic regimes dominated by horizontal movements, but also in pre-plate tectonic regimes dominated by vertical movements,” said Professor Guochun Zhao. , professor of earth sciences at HKU.

And he concluded: “This finding may help scientists on Earth resolve long-standing controversial questions about how and when felsic continents formed on our planet (Earth).