For the quiet, dusty part of the planet we see today, Mars has a surprisingly turbulent past that could reveal some clues about Earth’s past. A new study of the surface of Mars suggests that the red planet in its youth was dotted with volcanoes that may have echoed the roar of our little blue dot before forming tectonic plates about 3 billion years ago.

Using remote sensing data from multiple orbiters, planetary scientist Joseph Michalski of the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues cataloged signatures of volcanic activity in the planet’s Eridania region in the Southern Hemisphere. Unlike Earth, which contains a crust of interconnected continental plates floating on its sticky mantle, modern Mars is generally considered a single-plate planet that once had active volcanoes.

These volcanoes were huge and explosive; the largest was Mount Olympus; Shield volcano, the largest in the world, is 100 times larger than Mauna Loa in Hawaii.

One of the reasons why volcanoes on Mars grew so large was that the red planet did not have enough tectonic plates to properly relieve the pressure of the turbulent mantle. Without shifting and sinking of plates, the geological history of the Martian crust has not been reworked like our planet’s surface and may hold clues as to how the crust may have formed.

“The planet Mars represents a particularly valuable piece of the puzzle in this respect,” Michalski and colleagues write in their published paper. About 70 percent of the surface of Mars is older than 3 billion years, and about 45 percent is older than 3.6 billion years.

“Although the crust is heavily cratered, the ancient geological record remains largely intact and therefore provides an invaluable window into the early geological conditions of the Solar System and provides clues into the early evolution of the Earth’s crust,” the researchers explain. Michalski and his colleagues were interested in the Eridania region because of its heavily magnetized crust and evidence from the region that an ancient Martian sea once existed.

Using orbital data, researchers identified four different types of volcanoes in and near the Eridania Sea: volcanic domes, stratovolcanoes, pyroclastic shields, and caldera complexes, likely dating from a period of intense geological activity about 3.5 billion years ago. . .

The structure of these volcanoes on Mars was similar to those on Earth today, but were slightly larger in diameter; It was the result of lower gravity on the Red Planet and more explosive volcanism that ejected material further away.

“The diversity of volcanism is associated with acidic volcanic compositions that differ from other known groups of deposits or volcanic zones on Mars,” Michalski and colleagues write, adding to the surprising nature of the region.

The relief of the ancient landscape was also indicative. The thickness of volcanic sediments in the Eridania region, areas of folded and folded crust, and overhanging basins showed researchers that the crust of baby Mars may have been gradually inverted by a precursor to plate tectonics, called vertical tectonics.

Researchers suspect that hundreds more volcanoes may be found in the Eridania region; Many of these probably erupted beneath an ancient sea and provide a good parallel to Earth during the Archaean period, when Earth was a world composed predominantly of water and the first life forms emerged.

“This is a striking representation of the scale of activity in this region,” study author and planetary geologist Aster Cowart of the Planetary Science Institute told Space.com reporter Robert Lee.

“Seeing the Martian landscape shaped by these processes and preserved in stasis gives us a wonderful opportunity to explore the evolution of the planetary landscape in more detail.”