How Marsquakes Have Helped Researchers Investigate the Depths of the Red Planet’s Interior

Two recent studies used seismic data from NASA’s retired InSight mission to shed light on what lies beneath Mars’ surface and what it means for the planet’s history

September 26, 2025

Earthquakes can occur when our planet’s tectonic plates grind past each other. Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates—but marsquakes still exist, and they’re helping researchers discover new secrets about the Red Planet’s interior.

Two recent studies—published in Science and Nature in late August and early September—used seismic data from NASA’s InSight lander to shed light on what lies beneath Mars’ surface. InSight’s mission ended in 2022 after dropping the first seismometer on Mars four years prior. The instrument registered 1,319 seismic events before the lander’s retirement.

Marsquakes can occur when heat and pressure force rocks to crack, as well as when meteoroids strike the planet’s surface. In the Science study, researchers analyzed eight marsquakes that propagated strong, high-frequency waves deep into the planet’s mantle, the layer beneath the crust.

There, the waves did something interesting. They slowed down.

The team used computer simulations to reveal that this seismic wave distortion took place in small, specific regions within the mantle—seemingly, these were lumps of material different from their surroundings.

“They attribute these delays to very fine-scale heterogeneities, the result of chaotic mantle convection during Mars’ impact-filled early history,” Angela Hessler, senior editor at Science magazine, writes in the paper’s editor’s summary. “This widespread heterogeneity was then frozen in place as the planet’s crust cooled and mantle convection slowed to a creep.”

Fun fact: Clues to ancient life on Mars

On an arrowhead-shaped rock known as Cheyava Falls, NASA’s Perseverance rover spotted what scientists have called the “clearest sign” of ancient life on Mars yet: curious patterns of minerals that might have been produced by microbes.

Essentially, the researchers suggest the lumps within the mantle are fragments of large impactors that hit Mars in the early days of the solar system. The impacts would have melted parts of its surface into oceans of magma as pieces of the asteroid or other bodies sank deep into the planet’s interior, bringing along chunks of the crust and mantle. Some of the lumps are 2.5 miles wide.

illustration shows a meteoroid hitting a planet with a spacecraft on its surface and rocky chunks in its interior — An artist’s concept (not to scale) shows seismic waves propagating through Mars and hitting debris from ancient impacts throughout the planet's interior. The InSight lander sits at the surface on the right. NASA / JPL-Caltech

In a way, Mars is like a time capsule. Its lack of tectonic plates means the contents of its interior have not churned around as much as Earth’s, thus preserving the conditions of its early formation.

“We’ve never seen the inside of a planet in such fine detail and clarity before,” Constantinos Charalambous, lead author of the Science paper and an engineer at Imperial College London, says in a NASA statement. “What we’re seeing is a mantle studded with ancient fragments. Their survival to this day tells us Mars’ mantle has evolved sluggishly over billions of years. On Earth, features like these may well have been largely erased.”

In contrast, the team behind the Nature study used seismic data to investigate a feature of Mars’ interior that is very similar to Earth’s. Namely, that its innermost core is solid and surrounded by a liquid outer core, challenging previous research that suggested the Red Planet’s entire core is liquid.

“Our results suggest that Mars has a solid inner core making up about one-fifth of the planet’s radius—roughly the same proportion as Earth’s inner core. However, this similarity may be just coincidental,” Daoyuan Sun, a geophysicist at the University of Science and Technology of China and a lead researcher of the study, tells the Associated Press’ Marcia Dunn. Sun and his colleagues suggest the core is made up of iron and nickel—also like Earth’s—but it could have lighter elements, too, such as oxygen.

The state of Mars’ interior carries significance for our understanding of the Red Planet’s past, specifically regarding a bygone magnetic field that astronomers have suggested enveloped the planet billions of years ago. Earth’s own magnetic field is driven by convection within the liquid part of its core. The field protects our atmosphere—and, consequently, us—from the sun’s charged particles.

“From residual magnetization in the crust, we think that Mars did once have a magnetic field, possibly from a core structure similar to that of Earth. However, scientists think that the core must have cooled and stopped moving at some point in its history,” University of Oxford physicist Kevin Olsen and graduate student Mhairi Reid, who were not involved in the recent research, write for the Conversation.

This potential magnetic field may have protected a thicker Martian atmosphere than the very thin one that exists today. This atmosphere, in turn, may have enabled the presence of liquid water on the planet’s surface. Since Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field today, its disappearance may have triggered the loss of the planet’s atmosphere and its transformation into a cold and dry world.

“InSight’s data continues to reshape how we think about the formation of rocky planets and Mars in particular,” Mark Panning, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) research scientist, says in a statement. JPL led the InSight mission. “It’s exciting to see scientists making new discoveries with the quakes we detected!”

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