Lifeboat Foundation

For a quiet, dusty lump of a planet we see today, Mars has had a surprisingly violent history, one that could reveal some clues about Earth’s own past.

A new survey of the Martian surface suggests that in its younger years, the red planet was littered with volcanoes that might resemble the rumblings of our little blue dot before it formed tectonic plates some 3 billion years ago.

Planetary scientist Joseph Michalski of the University of Hong Kong and colleagues cataloged the scars of volcanic activity in the planet’s Eridania region in the southern hemisphere, using remote sensing data from multiple orbiters.