The Atlantic

A Tremor on Mars Confirms a Lasting Suspicion

Scientists have been searching for marsquakes since some of the earliest missions to the Red Planet.
Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona / Texas A&M

Because we’ve been sitting on the same rock for thousands of years, sometimes our language can tend to be a little Earth-centric. The word earthquake, for example, feels universal, as if it can be applied to any shaking ground. But zoom out beyond our tectonic plates, and the vocabulary shifts.

Mars, for instance, has marsquakes.

They sound too silly to be real, as if a Netflix show about future Mars settlements made up a scary natural disaster. But tremors on Mars are a thing, and right now scientists believe they

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