Mars Volcano Recently Erupted

A 20-mile volcanic fissure on Mars may be a recent eruption. Scientists are considering the possibility that Mars is still active.

Their commitment to long ages forces the moyboys into an implausible story for Mars: (1) lots of volcanoes, (2) billions of years with nothing happening, (3) new volcanoes. A fissure reported by the University of Arizona to be possibly as young as 50,000 years old leaves no other story plot. The major volcanoes on Mars, such as Olympus Mons (largest volcano in the solar system) erupted 3 to 4 billion years ago according to the standard myth. How young is the new fissure called Cerberus Fossae in the plains of Elysium?

“This may be the youngest volcanic deposit yet documented on Mars,” said lead study author David Horvath, who did the research as a postdoctoral researcher at UArizona and is now a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. “If we were to compress Mars’ geologic history into a single day, this would have occurred in the very last second.”

They don’t really know just how young the recent eruption is. The paper in Icarus [1] indicates that they used the flawed crater-count dating method (see 29 Jan 2019 and 22 May 2012). It could be as young as a few years ago, any time before the Mars InSight lander began operation.

Most volcanism on the Red Planet occurred between 3 and 4 billion years ago, with smaller eruptions in isolated locations continuing perhaps as recently as 3 million years ago. But, until now, there was no evidence to indicate Mars could still be volcanically active.

Additionally, the press release says,

“The young age of this deposit absolutely raises the possibility that there could still be volcanic activity on Mars.“

Mars portrait (May 2002, NASA) Scars of large extinct volcanoes are visible.

Cover-Ups

The planetary scientists try to account for this large gap between the old eruptions and the new ones. They say, for instance, that

• It’s a different kind of eruption than the ones that created the large shield volcanoes.
• It may have been triggered by a meteorite impact that landed 6 miles away.
• The eruption may have been caused by water touching magmatic heat and exploding.

And yet the enigma remains. Why is heat still close to the surface after billions of years? Mars has less than 1/6th the volume of the Earth (NASA). There are no large planets near Mars to cause tidal flexing. Mars should be dying and near dead internally. That’s what these very scientists used to think.

The volcanic deposit described in this study, along with ongoing seismic rumbling in the planet’s interior detected by InSight and possible evidence for releases of methane plumes into the atmosphere detected by NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, suggest that Mars is far from a cold, inactive world, Andrews-Hanna said.

“All these data seem to be telling the same story,” he said. “Mars isn’t dead.”

The InSight lander (2018) has reported Marsquakes from the direction of the fissure.

Similar reports of recent activity have been made about Mercury and the Moon, two bodies that should have been long dead (17 October 2014, 30 Sept 2011, 14 May 2019). Jupiter’s moon Io (similar in size to our moon) is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus pumps out enough hot water to create its own ring around the gas giant. Neptune’s moon Triton and even distant Pluto show signs of recent eruptive activity. Suggestions of current activity have also been reported for Titan, Europa, and Venus. Is something way off with the standard age estimates of Mars and these other active bodies?

Look at This Shiny Object!

As is customary for evolutionists, they created a distraction with hydrobioscopy. They say that the eruption indicates that Mars might still be habitable for life.

“The interaction of ascending magma and the icy substrate of this region could have provided favorable conditions for microbial life fairly recently and raises the possibility of extant life in this region,” he said.

Similar volcanic fissures in this region were the source of enormous floods, perhaps as recently as 20 million years ago, as groundwater erupted out onto the surface.

Increasing the perhapsimaybecouldness index allows for all kinds of ways to say stuff happens when least expected. Keep your eyes on the ball: Mars appears to be active, but it shouldn’t be.

[1] Horvath et al., “Evidence for geologically recent explosive volcanism in Elysium Planitia, Mars.” Icarus, Volume 365, 1 September 2021, 114499. The Abstract says, “This young age implies that if this deposit is volcanic then the Cerberus Fossae region may not be extinct and that Mars may still be volcanically active.”