{"id":9676,"date":"2025-08-29T04:48:39","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T08:48:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/?p=9676"},"modified":"2025-08-29T04:48:39","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T08:48:39","slug":"mars-interior-more-like-rocky-road-than-millionaires-shortbread-scientists-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/?p=9676","title":{"rendered":"Mars\u2019 Interior More Like Rocky Road Than Millionaire\u2019s Shortbread, Scientists Find"},"content":{"rendered":"

New research reveals the Red Planet\u2019s mantle preserves a record of its violent beginnings.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

New research<\/a> published in the journal Science <\/em>reveals the Red Planet\u2019s mantle preserves a record of its violent beginnings.<\/p>\n

The inside of Mars isn\u2019t smooth and uniform like familiar textbook illustrations. Instead, new research reveals it\u2019s chunky – more like a Rocky Road brownie than a neat slice of Millionaire\u2019s Shortbread.<\/p>\n

We often picture rocky planets like Earth and Mars as having smooth, layered interiors – with crust, mantle, and core stacked like the biscuit base, caramel middle, and chocolate topping of a millionaire\u2019s shortbread. But the reality for Mars is rather less tidy.<\/p>\n

Seismic vibrations detected by NASA\u2019s InSight mission revealed subtle anomalies, which led scientists from Imperial College London and other institutions to uncover a messier reality: Mars\u2019s mantle contains ancient fragments up to 4km wide from its formation – preserved like geological fossils from the planet\u2019s violent early history.<\/p>\n

History of gigantic impacts<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mars and the other rocky planets formed about 4.5 billion years ago, as dust and rock orbiting the young Sun gradually clumped together under gravity.<\/p>\n

Once Mars had largely taken shape, it was struck by giant, planet-sized objects in a series of near-cataclysmic collisions – the kind that also likely formed Earth\u2019s Moon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese colossal impacts unleashed enough energy to melt large parts of the young planet into vast magma oceans,\u201d said lead researcher Dr. Constantinos Charalambous from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. \u201cAs those magma oceans cooled and crystallised, they left behind compositionally distinct chunks of material – and we believe it\u2019s these we\u2019re now detecting deep inside Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n

These early impacts and their aftermath scattered and mixed fragments of the planet’s early crust and mantle – and possibly debris from the impacting objects themselves – into the molten interior. As Mars slowly cooled, these chemically diverse chunks were trapped in a sluggishly churning mantle, like ingredients folded into a Rocky Road brownie mix, and the mixing was too weak to fully smooth things out.<\/p>\n

Unlike Earth, where plate tectonics continuously recycle the crust and mantle, Mars sealed up early beneath a stagnant outer crust, preserving its interior as a geological time capsule.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of this chaos likely unfolded in Mars\u2019s first 100 million years,\u201d says Dr. Charalambous. \u201cThe fact that we can still detect its traces after four and a half billion years shows just how sluggishly Mars\u2019s interior has been churning ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listening into Mars<\/strong><\/p>\n

The evidence comes from seismic data recorded by NASA\u2019s InSight lander – in particular, eight especially clear marsquakes, including two triggered by two recent meteorite impacts that left 150-metre-wide craters in Mars\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

InSight picks up seismic waves travelling through the mantle and the scientists could see that waves of higher frequencies took longer to reach its sensors from the impact site. These signs of interference, they say, shows that the interior is chunky rather than smooth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese signals showed clear signs of interference as they travelled through Mars\u2019s deep interior,\u201d said Dr. Charalambous. \u201cThat\u2019s consistent with a mantle full of structures of different compositional origins – leftovers from Mars’s early days.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happened on Mars is that, after those early events, the surface solidified into a stagnant lid,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt sealed off the mantle beneath, locking in those ancient chaotic features \u2014 like a planetary time capsule.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike the interior of Earth<\/strong><\/p>\n

Earth\u2019s crust, by comparison, is always slowly shifting and recycling material from the surface into our planet\u2019s mantle \u2013 at tectonic plates such as the Cascadia subduction zone where some of the plates forming the Pacific Ocean floor are pushed under the North American continental plate.<\/p>\n

The chunks detected in Mars\u2019s mantle follow a striking pattern, with a few large fragments – up to 4 km wide – surrounded by many smaller ones.<\/p>\n

Professor Tom Pike, who worked with Dr. Charalambous to unravel what caused these chunks, said: \u201cWhat we are seeing is a \u2019fractal\u2019 distribution, which happens when the energy from a cataclysmic collision overwhelms the strength of an object. You see the same effect when a glass falls onto a tiled floor as when a meteorite collides with a planet: it breaks into a few big shards and a large number of smaller pieces. It\u2019s remarkable that we can still detect this distribution today.\u201d<\/p>\n

The finding could have implications for our understanding of how the other rocky planets – like Venus and Mercury – evolved over billions of years. This new discovery of Mars\u2019s preserved interior offers a rare glimpse into what might lie hidden beneath the surface of stagnant worlds.<\/p>\n

\u201cInSight\u2019s data continues to reshape how we think about the formation of rocky planets, and Mars in particular,\u201d said Dr. Mark Panning of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. JPL led the InSight mission before its end in 2022. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting to see scientists making new discoveries with the quakes we detected!\u201d<\/p>\n

– Simon Levey<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New research reveals the Red Planet\u2019s mantle preserves a record of its violent beginnings. New research published in the journal Science reveals the Red Planet\u2019s mantle preserves a record of its violent beginnings. The inside of Mars isn\u2019t smooth and uniform like familiar textbook illustrations. Instead, new research reveals it\u2019s chunky – more like a Rocky Road…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":9677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.imperial.ac.uk\/ImageCropToolT4\/imageTool\/uploaded-images\/insight-lander_1756301502229_x2.jpg?r=467","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9678,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9676\/revisions\/9678"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}