They are talking about recent, active volcanos, OGF. There were plenty in the planet's early days. Olympus Mons comes to mind. It is roughly the size of Greece.

The tallest mountain on any of the Solar System’s planets is Olympus Mons, a giant extinct volcano on Mars that is some 14 miles (or 21.9 kilometers) high. That’s about two and a half times the height of Mount Everest. This behemoth formed some 3 billion years ago when the Red Planet was peppered with volcanoes spewing vast quantities of magma across the Martian planes.

Since then, Mars has cooled and become much less active. Indeed, a common view among planetary geologists is that today there are no active volcanoes on Mars.

Now that view may have to change thanks to the work of David Horvath at the University of Arizona in Tucson and colleagues. This team has analyzed a region of Mars called Elysium Planitia which is pockmarked by a set of semi-parallel fissures called Cerberus Fossae. The team says that one of these fissures appears to be less than 200,000 years old — and possibly as young as 50,000 years old.

First, some background. Planetary geologists have long thought that the Cerberus Fossae fissures must have formed in lava plains as they cooled and deformed. They can determine a rough age for these plains by counting the number of impact craters, which suggests the region is between 500,000 and 2.5 million years old — relatively young in Martian terms.

But the team has found an even younger part of this region near a fissure known as the Cerberus Fossae mantling unit, which is a few tens of kilometers long. The team studied this region using visible light images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and thermal infrared images from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

In geological terms, that is brand new.

There is another line of evidence that suggests this region could still be active. In 2018, NASA placed a robotic lander called InSight on the Martian surface carrying seismic equipment to monitor Marsquakes. The spacecraft landed in the Elysium Planitia, about 1,700 kilometers from the Cerberus Fossae mantling unit. Last year, the lander measured two Marsquakes that originated in this area. On Earth, that can suggest volcanic activity.

Volcanism might provide a more mundane explanation for an observation that has excited astrobiologists for many years — the discovery of low levels of methane in parts of the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, methane is produced by volcanoes but also by algae and cows farting. It is widely thought of as a potential biomarker. That was interesting for astrobiologists when Mars was thought to be volcanically inactive. If that has changed, the methane suddenly becomes much less interesting.

They are talking about recent, active volcanos, OGF. There were plenty in the planet's early days. Olympus Mons comes to mind. It is roughly the size of Greece.

First Evidence Of A Recently Active Volcano On Mars

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the...olcano-on-mars

Nov 24, 2020 5:00 PM



Fascinating .....

I find that very interesting, Surfermom.

Just think, years ago in our school years, we would never have thought we would discover this such news about other planets. Amazing!

NASA has logged another extraterrestrial first on its latest mission to Mars: converting carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into pure, breathable oxygen, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday. The unprecedented extraction of oxygen, literally out of thin air on Mars, was achieved Tuesday by an experimental device aboard Perseverance, a six-wheeled science rover that landed on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 after a seven-month journey from Earth.

Thanks Omah, that's brilliant and very informative.
It's a real asset to the forum to have someone who knows where to look for the information, and has the time to do it....

NASA extracts breathable oxygen from thin Martian air

https://www.devdiscourse.com/article...ian-air-and-mo



The first step in terraforming .....

I've got to ask the question Omah, if we can convert CO2 to pure oxygen, why aren't we doing it here and solve all the planets problems?

The oxygen generation was performed by a toaster-sized unit in the rover called Moxie - the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment.

It made 5 grams of the gas - equivalent to what an astronaut at Mars would need to breathe for roughly 10 minutes.