Basically, what this new finding tells us is that the chances of microbial life being found on Mars are quite a bit higher now! –

 

 

Marsquake! Scientists Find New Signs of Rumblings on the Red Planet

 

By Michael D. Lemonick (TimeScience)

 

When space probes first began taking closeup images of Mars in the early 1970s, the pictures revealed what appeared to be a long dead world. Ancient waterways were visible on the surface, but they had been dry for billions of years. Crater-topped volcanoes dotted the planet — some of them a mile or more higher than Everest — but they had stopped erupting eons ago.

 

It all made a melancholy sort of sense: with only a tenth the mass of Earth, Mars has too little gravity to have held onto an atmosphere for very long, so any surface water would have escaped into space along with it. Its small size also let Mars’ inner heat drain away relatively quickly, just as a newly baked bagel cools faster than a loaf of bread. Without that heat to drive volcanism, the planet would surely have gone seismically still.

 

Read more here.

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