Mars May Have An Explosive Volcanic Past

Billions of years ago, Mars was covered in ice sheets, oceans and volcanic eruptions that led to the creation of its mountains. However, new evidence reportedly collected by the Mars Curiosity Rover indicates that the primordial volcanoes were far stronger than was previously believed.

According to a report, the Mineralogy (Chemin) X-ray diffraction instrument present on the rover helped to identify a substance called tridymite which is a kind of crystal that is also found on our planet and is created by exceedingly silicic, hot and violent volcanoes. The substance was discovered in the Gale Crater, a stretch which measures 154 kilometers in diameter and has a mountain rising from its floor. "The kind of volcano that would produce tridymite is usually very explosive," said Richard Morris, planetary scientist from NASA. "So we were surprised to find tridymite at Gale crater". Incidentally, the crater was also the landing spot of the Curiosity rover in 2012.  

Silicic volcanoes are extremely explosive types of volcanoes that occur on our planet when the tectonic plates move from the outer shell of the Earth into its mantle, and water is forced into the molten depths. Subsequently, the plates melt into magma and pushes out onto the surface as a powerful volcano. According to scientists, there has been no known evidence of plate tectonics on the red planet therefore they are baffled by the proof of silicic eruptions.

Mars is known to have had vast water filled lakes, with the Gale crater thought to be one of these sites, and such a fact suggests that the Gale lake water may have led to plate tectonics that resulted in an explosive volcanic eruption. According to a report, the presence of tridymite could also have been due to some other mechanism which is unknown to Earth.

The indications of an explosive volcano once plaguing Mars is not the first of its past geological activity evidences. Earlier this year, it was discovered that a big meteorite impact 3.4 billion years ago generated the first tsunami wave made up of liquid water on the red planet.