Earth doesn’t have a monopoly on quakes. Mars has its own eerie version: marsquakes. Without moving tectonic plates, these tremors come from something more haunting. The planet’s crust cracks and contracts like cold glass in the deep freeze of space. Internal magma may still press from below. Meteorites strike its surface like cosmic drumbeats. Mars is a giant, cooling engine, and its groans are seismic.
In 2022, NASA’s InSight lander - a robotic ear pressed to the Martian ground-heard the planet’s loudest cry. A marsquake clocking in at magnitude 5.0.
For Mars, this was a planet-shattering event. For us, it was a revelation. This single tremor was the strongest of over 1,300 quakes detected, a crown jewel in a dataset that screams one truth: Mars is not dead.
It’s a world in slow-motion collapse, whispering its secrets through vibrations. That magnitude 5.0 quake wasn't caused by shifting continents, but by a planet literally shrinking and fracturing as its internal heat escapes into the void.
Forget a dead rock. Mars is a geological ghost, still trembling from the memory of its own formation. InSight didn't just listen to Mars; it heard the heartbeat of a world we wrongly wrote off as a corpse. The ground is speaking. We just had to learn how to listen.