9.10.2026

Images show fresh boulder tracks near the source of a possible temblor on the Red Planet

On Mars, Cerberus Fossae (shown) is a dynamic landscape of cliffs and valleys just north of the planet’s equator. Researchers believe that a recent marsquake sent multiple boulders tumbling in the area.

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA/JPL-CALTECH/NASA

Earthquakes frequently trigger rock falls. Now there’s solid evidence marsquakes can send boulders tumbling, too.

Scientists mined high-resolution imagery of the Red Planet taken shortly after a recent temblor and found hundreds of new imprints left by tumbling boulders, researchers report September 2 in npj Space Exploration. Such rockfalls can be used as a proxy for seismic data, which is difficult to collect across the solar system.

The data were collected with NASA’s InSight lander, which touched down on Mars in 2018. Over the next four years, its seismometer detected more than a thousand marsquakes. Many of those temblors originated in a region known as Cerberus Fossae, just north of the Martian equator. That’s a dynamic landscape riddled with slopes, cracks and rocks on the move, says Vijayan, a planetary scientist at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, who goes by a single name. “Thousands and thousands of boulders have fallen.”