On the second anniversary of the devastating August 2023 wildfires in Lahaina and Kula, the sound of hammers and saws now fills neighborhoods once reduced to ash. According to the Maui County recovery dashboard, 280 homes are currently under construction and 50 have already been completed, exceeding early expectations that rebuilding might take years to begin. For many residents, including families like the Kaleiopus, seeing frames rise and trees regrow has brought a new sense of hope, even as memories of the fire’s destruction and loss remain.

As reported by Colleen Uechi, progress is reflected not only in construction but also in declining numbers of people living in temporary housing. Federal disaster recovery funds, nonprofit support, and philanthropic efforts are helping survivors move forward, with $1.6 billion in federal grants slated to aid rebuilding and homeownership. Still, many families remain displaced, either unable to afford full rebuilds or hesitant to return to neighborhoods that feel eerily quiet compared to the lively communities they once knew.

Community leaders stress that recovery must honor Lahaina’s deep cultural and historical roots. Advocates like Archie Kalepa caution against repeating the mistakes of over-commercialization and emphasize the need for multi-generational families to return home to preserve traditions. County officials, meanwhile, have pledged to prioritize housing for kama‘āina and to ensure that rebuilding does not come at the expense of heritage. Despite ongoing challenges, the resilience of survivors and the collective spirit of the community have been central to Lahaina’s recovery, signaling that healing is possible even amid grief.

• Maui Wildfire
• Maui
• Wildfire
• disaster recovery

If you’re still rocking a crinkly plastic bottle from a gas station, it’s time for an upgrade—and Labor Day is giving you the perfect excuse. Stanley, known for their viral, ultra-durable drinkware, is offering up to 30% off select bottles and colorways for a limited time. Whether you’re hitting the trails, heading to class, or just sitting on the couch, now’s the time to snag one.

Some people love a gallon-sized hydration challenge. I prefer a bottle that won’t double as a dumbbell. This slim 20-ounce bottle fits easily into your bag or car cupholder, and it’s surprisingly easy to clean thanks to its two-part twist-off design. The narrow mouth keeps splashes to a minimum, and the wider base lets you toss in ice or get a bottle brush into each nook and cranny. It keeps drinks cold for four hours and iced for up to 11. Also available in larger 33.8-ounce and 34-ounce sizes if you’re thirstier than I am. And some colors are more deeply discounted. 

• Stanley IceFlow Fast Flow Water Bottle, $26.25 (was $35)
• Stanley Adventure-To-Go Vacuum Bottle 25 oz, $21 (was $28)
• Stanley IceFlow Flip Straw 2.0 Water Bottle 36 oz, $33.75 (was $45)

The post Stanley’s viral water bottles are up to 30% off and cuter than ever appeared first on Popular Science.

Washington State’s vast Olympic National Park sprawls across almost one million acres, 600 miles of trails, and 64 trailheads. Many of these important open spaces  are in wilderness areas, meaning inaccessible to vehicles and machines. So how do park rangers maintain them for visitors? 

They don’t drop humanoid drones out of the sky, if that’s what you’re thinking. In fact, their solution is a much cuter hybrid: Mules.

Mules are the result of interbreeding between a male donkey (Equus asinus) and a female horse (Equus caballus). Thanks to their strength, agility, and endurance, they are the perfect pack animal, according to a Washington’s National Park Fund statement. In fact, mules have been helping maintain the trails in national parks since the early 1900s.

“They get a lot of the endurance and resilience from the donkey’s side, and the personable attitude of the horse mom,” Olympic National Park packers Heidi Brill told The Seattle Times earlier this summer. 

For years, Olympic National Park has been nominating one of their four-legged workers as “Mule of the Month” to introduce the team and their crucial contribution to the public. May’s Mule of the Month was a spirited and quick “sports-model” mule named RainCloud. June’s Mule of the Month was dark-coated Katherine, while July’s was 26-year-old Daisy, dubbed the “magnificent matriarch.” 

“Olympic National Park’s mule team helps transport equipment, materials, and supplies throughout the park’s designated wilderness areas,” reads a social media post by the park. “If you encounter them on the trail, find a safe space to step aside and let them pass. But don’t feel bashful about snapping a few photos of these backcountry celebrities!”

The park’s over two dozen mules each weigh on average about 1,000 pounds. Given that mules can haul around 20% of their body weight, this long-eared team carries everything from trail maintenance gear to construction materials and research equipment during their working season (April through October) at Olympic National Park. They even support the search and rescue teams, safely evacuating injured hikers out of the wilderness.  

When a new mule arrives at the park, Brill and her colleagues put them “next to good mentor mules,” she explained in the statement. “Temperament is important because they are diplomats for the park,” she added. “About 75% of our job is just knowing the characters in the team, and who gets along with who and can go where in the string.” 

It remains to be seen who will win the prestigious honor of being August’s Mule of the Month.  

The post Meet the chonky, hard-working mules of Olympic National Park appeared first on Popular Science.

Boston residents who are tired of their car commute could consider a different option: the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s system of ferries, which criss-crosses Boston Harbor and provided 1.4 million rides in 2024. “While ferries carry less than half a percent of the T's total average weekday ridership, the number of people commuting by boat has ticked upward.”

As Andrea Perdomo-Hernandez explains in a piece for WBUR, the state government granted the MBTA and other agencies over $2 million to expand water transportation as an alternative to driving.

Boston’s mayoral candidates both support expanding ferry service, including public-private partnerships that service some of the lines. “Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA advisory board, which represents cities and towns serviced by the T, said he’s all for expanding ferry offerings, noting water transit is more environmentally friendly than cars,” but noted that expanding service will likely require state-level support.

• Boston
• Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
• MBTA
• Ferries
• Water Taxi

Di seguito divulghiamo un estratto tradotto dall'articolo originale in lingua inglese divulgato dalla NASA su alcune...

A new poll by the Commonwealth Housing Coalition shows that most Virginians believe their state needs more housing — and that few trust their local government to solve the problem.

According to an article by Dan Egitto in Arlington Now, 73 percent of the poll’s respondents said Virginia needs more affordable housing. Among Northern Virginia residents, 64 percent said “building more affordable housing is more important than protecting the character of neighborhoods from change,” and just 33 percent said they trust their local government to address the cost and availability of housing.

The results indicate that despite city governments’ desire for local control of zoning issues, residents see the need for broader, state-level policies to address the housing shortage.

Virginians also seem to support increased density and upzoning. “A total of 79% of Northern Virginia respondents supported allowing homes to be built on slightly smaller lots, 77% supported a cap on increasing rental costs at older properties and another 77% supported placing requirements on local governments that allow homes to be built faster.” The majority of residents also support making it easier for churches to build housing on their property and simplifying the process for building apartments in commercial districts.

For over two years, Arlington County has been embroiled in a debate over a proposed ‘missing middle housing’ plan that would have allowed up to six units on a single-family lot. The plan was scrapped in late 2024 after a judge ruled against it.

• Housing Crisis
• Zoning
• Upzoning
• Zoning Reform
• Density
• Multifamily Housing
• Housing Supply
• State Preemption
• Local Control
• NIMBY

In the 1999 animated film, Toy Story 2, Buzz Lightyear and his fellow sentient playthings enter an airport’s ‘back-of-the-house’ to rescue Sheriff Woody Pride from a suitcase. Together the toys encounter a world of diverging conveyor belts, inclines and declines, and seemingly endless turns, all designed to carry checked baggage from an airline ticket counter or curbside kiosk to its intended flights.

According to Michael Rangole, maintenance manager for Vanderlande Industries—the company that maintains and operates the baggage handling system at California’s San José Mineta International Airport (SJC)—Toy Story 2 is incredibly accurate. 

“San Jose’s system alone has over 120 curves,” says Rangole. 

Beyond what’s conveyed in Toy Story 2, what exactly happens to your luggage from the time it is tagged to the moment it’s placed into the plane’s cargo hold? The answer may surprise you. 

“It all starts with what’s known as ‘bag hygiene,’” says Simran Sandhar, SJC’s terminal and customer experience superintendent. The term refers to everything from stowing luggage handles to keeping oddly shaped items, like fishing rods and bowling balls, off the belt (these are brought to an oversized baggage counter after tagging). 

“If luggage doesn’t go onto the belt properly,” says Sandhar, “it will encounter some hiccups and delays in the baggage make-up area,” which is the behind-the-scenes zone where luggage is sorted before being loaded onto departing planes. “Good bag hygiene allows a bag to get where it’s supposed to go with minimal issues.”

When you drop off a piece of luggage at an airline check-in counter, an agent weighs your bag and threads an airline-issued baggage tag through its handle, sealing both sides of the tag together with a sticky adhesive. Each tag includes the airline code and unique baggage ID number, a three-letter code for your destination airport, and a barcode that stores your flight number, destination, and passenger info. 

There’s also what’s known as a “bingo tag,” says Sandhar, “that little barcode sticker that an agent will rip off from your baggage tag and stick directly on your luggage. It’s used as backup, just in case the main tag falls off.”

Once a piece of luggage arrives within SJC’s behind-the-scenes make-up area, an automatic tag reader will scan its barcode, followed by a series of photo sensors (“SJC has over 800 of them,” says Rangole) that track the bag’s progress. These sensors provide airport personnel with a general idea of where the bag is, what time it arrived within the make-up area, and how long it’s been in the system. 

After a bag is scanned, it’s sent along the airport’s system of conveyor belts either left, right, up, down, or center depending on which TSA X-ray scanners are available. 

Even your checked bags go through a TSA security check. “Each and every piece of checked luggage is then screened, assuring that they’re not carrying any prohibited items,” says Sandhar, like fireworks and lithium batteries (friendly reminder to not leave those new rechargeable headphones in your checked bag). Bags requiring additional manual screening by a TSA agent go in one direction, cleared luggage heads off in another.

(Have you ever arrived at your destination and opened your bag, only to find a note inside saying that your luggage has been inspected? This is the moment in the baggage process where you’ll receive that note.)

A cleared bag makes its way into the make-up area’s sortation system, where it passes under another barcode reader that identifies the bag’s airline. If it’s Southwest it goes off in one direction, if it’s Alaska it travels to another.

“The entire process takes an average of three-and-a-half-minutes,” says Rangole, “if there aren’t any hiccups.”

Despite the brief amount of time that a bag typically spends in an airport’s make-up area, most airlines have a cut-off time for checking in luggage (typically 45 minutes before domestic flights and longer for international ones). “Once the luggage leaves our system,” says Sandhar, “it still needs to be sorted according to flight, transported over to that flight, loaded onto the plane, and weight and balance calculated.” This latter part refers to the proper distribution of a plane’s overall cargo weight. 

If there’s a glitch in the system your bag might get delayed. Say a bag gets stuck on a conveyor belt because of a loose bag strap or a pinched wheel. “An alarm will go off and an airport team member will get to that bag and unjam it as quickly as possible,” says Sandhar. 

But don’t worry too much about checking a backpack, which can often have loose bits dangling off from it. “It’s the responsibility of an airline agent to place bags like these in a bin with the straps tucked in [part of baggage hygiene], which should alleviate a majority of the hazard.”

In 2023 alone, U.S. airports handled more than 470 million checked bags. Approximately two-million of those bags never made it to their destinations. 

Lost luggage often occurs when tags fall off and sensors don’t know where to send the bag. Sandhar recommends always removing airline baggage tags, as well as those little bingo stickers, once you’ve left your destination airport. “If you have a lot of tags on your bag you’re going to cause a delay,” he says, “because we might have to do some manual investigation to ensure that it gets to the right place.”

What do TSA bag scanners actually see?

How do airplane toilets work?

Why do we still have to use airplane mode?

Why airplanes leave white streaks in the sky

Why do we put seatbacks up for landing? An aviation expert explains.

Why do our ears pop on a plane? An audiologist explains.

Of course, there’s also human error. A luggage handler may load a bag onto the wrong flight, or not have enough time to make a transfer if the time between connecting flights is especially limited. “Not every airport baggage make-up area is the same,” says Sandhar. It all depends on their size, traffic volume, budget, and the specific technology they have in place. “While the core purpose remains the same—to group bags for a specific flight—the implementation can range from fully automated systems with robotics to manual sorting areas where staff physically load bins and carts.”

To help assure your bag gets where it needs to go, always check your airline-issued baggage tag to make sure the agent has issued your info correctly. Also, put a name tag on your luggage that includes your name, phone number and country code (if you’re traveling internationally). “An address isn’t necessary,” says Sandhar. “But your name and phone number will pay dividends in the unlikely event that a tag falls off and no airline is able to identify whose luggage it is.”

It also would have made Buzz Lightyear’s quest to recover his friend so much easier. 

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post What really happens to your bag after you check it in? appeared first on Popular Science.

This piece originally appeared on Chuck Wolfe’s Substack — Resurgence: A Journey — in advance of Dan Parolek’s Missing Middle talk in Santa Fe.

For about a year, I’ve been writing about Santa Fe as a laboratory for tensions and ambiguities within both places and ourselves. Today, I turn to a lesser‑known Santa Fe episode from 1962–63: Lewis Mumford’s visit and the four conversational articles that followed in New Mexico Architect.

These articles were informal talks led by J.B. Jackson and Landscape magazine. Mumford played many roles — expert, observer, and conversant — discussing Santa Fe’s landscape, architecture, growth, and civic life.

If you think Mumford seems outdated or only see him as a contemporary critic of Jane Jacobs, please keep reading. He highlighted challenges we still face today and offered a straightforward way to understand the dynamics of place.

Thanks in part to Travel and Leisure, Santa Fe’s historic core is synonymous with adobe walls, earthen hues, and narrow streets that many admire. But as many know better than I, there are many other aspects of Santa Fe.

As a relative newcomer to the City Different — with a legal and planning background — I’ve been learning not only from the City’s pending plan and code updates, but also from local and diverse sources. Examples include the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, the advocacy‑driven Chainbreaker Collective, Friends of Architecture Santa Fe, and the housing resource Homewise, whose speaker series regularly hosts contemporary thinkers on walkability, zoning, and housing.

There is, of course, an elephant in the room — Santa Fe’s distinctive architectural style — especially in the historic center. Other plots and subplots span from the railyards to Midtown — and the omnipresent tension between preservation goals and today’s housing and other social needs.

When Mumford arrived in Santa Fe, he was one of America’s most influential thinkers on cities and culture. In the four informal discussions, he offered sharp first impressions: ecological wisdom, architectural critique, urban planning observations, and civic education stories.

His remarks remain uncannily relevant today, echoing the topics of the Homewise Speaker Series, the Preserving Place Symposium, recent Friends of Architecture events, and, not least, the regional architecture which Chris Wilson has articulated in the intervening years.

Mumford’s perspectives frame many of the questions we still ask about housing types, climate, water availability, “authenticity,” sprawl, and community.

The remainder of this piece comments on each of the four Mumford conversations and provides links for further review.

“Sometimes it happens that things you see about a city during the first twelve hours are more sharply incised on your mind and sometimes truer than the things you discover after being there for twelve months… At least you have my sharp impressions this evening.”

On his first walk through Santa Fe, Mumford saw how the City’s brown tones and starkness outside of the center vary from other cities and places. He celebrated the absence of lush lawns in an arid climate: “Grass lawns are an absurdity… In dry areas, you are commanded by the climate and the landscape to use the natural vegetation and keep it relatively austere.”

This ecological realism led him to cast Santa Fe as a social oasis: a place of community in the high desert. He praised small housing clusters surrounded by select trees and adobe houses as models for future housing: “a miniature oasis with an excellent micro‑climate and a fine human environment.”

Like later New Urbanists who came to and worked in New Mexico, he noted how courtyards reflect pueblo patterns, paralleling Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” — an environment where children remain within adult lines of sight and physical proximity between neighbors encourages mutual support.

Mumford warned against isolated homes on large open parcels. Sprawl undermines neighborliness and access, he said: “People tend, when they think of their ideal home, to picture one as far as possible from the center of town. How unfortunate!”

He believed Santa Fe’s beauty comes from intimate urban spaces rather than surrounding, unbounded subdivisions. In modern terms, Mumford’s “social oasis” has much in common with trendy concepts today, such as accessory dwelling units (ADUs), cohousing communities, pocket neighborhoods, “missing middle housing” and “15‑minute cities”—places designed for connection rather than isolation.

“What is the New Mexican style? You can’t stop life at any one moment. You can’t stop the development of architecture at any one moment.”

The second conversation with Mumford focused on the early phase of the ongoing Santa Fe Style debate — the recently enacted Historic Style Ordinance from the late 1950s, which required new buildings in Santa Fe’s core to replicate an “old” look.

Albert Solnit — then the Principal Planner of the New Mexico State Planning Office, and formerly the planning director in Fairfield, Connecticut, who had once lived in Greenwich Village — argued that imposing a style developed under obsolete materials ignored the realities of modern construction. Mumford agreed that adobe had virtues — its mass, warmth, and ability to limit glass had spared the City from “absurdities” wrought by all-glass modernism. But he opposed legislation that forced architects to build “fake” adobe:

“The attempt to perpetuate this traditional form by purely external means without regard to the actual character of the building is a dubious one.”

Mumford agreed that new buildings should respect climate and culture, but warned against superficial imitation. Mumford insisted that architecture must evolve and that regional styles should allow latitude: “I would agree with you, it is very dangerous to lay down by ordinance a fixed style. That’s the way to kill the development of architecture”.

Instead, he proposed a flexible advisory commission and underscored civic education to inspire ongoing new designs. He commented — based only on his brief visit — that the City’s architectural heritage should include more than adobe: Archbishop Lamy’s stone Cathedral is part of the tradition, he said. Disallowing new forms would erase this diversity.

John Gaw Meem, often called the father of the Santa Fe Style, defended the Historic Ordinance. He explained how modern stucco and cement supplementations were natural evolutions from adobe and that calling them “fake” was misguided.

Meem said Santa Fe’s basic shapes and elemental forms — parapets softened by cement, low walls, and rounded corners — link buildings into a centuries‑old tradition that flowed from indigenous, Spanish, and territorial influences. Meem believed that inside the historic areas, architects should follow these forms to preserve the City’s “unique” human quality and charm.

The exchange revealed three distinct problems, which Mumford explained: preserving historic structures within the core; allowing sensitive adaptations for modern uses; and recognizing that much of the City lies outside the historic center.

In summary, he respected Meem’s point but pushed back: In his view, requiring imitation by law risked superficiality and stifled innovation. Rather than legislating taste, he urged education and context‑sensitive design.

“There is a top limit to the population in such a region as this… if you want to keep your character and integrity.”

In the third conversation, Mumford foreshadowed the phased growth controls later litigated in Ramapo and Petaluma. He confronted the City’s future size. He suggested that Santa Fe might cap its population at about 75,000 — after which new growth should form another center a few miles away.

According to Mumford, water supply and thriving communities need such natural limits: “When cities grow without control, they cease to perform their functions… they end up just going in for bigness for bigness’ sake.” He noted how sprawl not only diminishes the organic associations of community life but also burdens city budgets with the costs of roads and utility extensions.

Participants debated further where and how growth should occur. Planner Wallace Franke spoke to urban form and suggested that Santa Fe’s identity lies more in its narrow streets and plaza than in any single architectural style. (See my “Leveraging Place in Santa Fe” talk for more on this point of view).

Franke’s insights are revealing if one considers how Santa Fe has evolved. He suggested that replicating “Santa Fe style” houses along highways (think Cerrillos Road) would compromise the City’s urban form.

Mumford agreed: linear sprawl along highways was “hideous,” and evoked compact, connected development and using hillsides (like in San Francisco or pueblos) to cluster houses and preserve open space. He challenged the Federal Housing Administration for promoting low‑density subdivision sprawl over time and urged local authorities to advocate for solutions consistent with New Mexico’s ecology.

Mumford also stressed that row houses and courtyards could create higher density without significant height impacts. His clear message was that “stringing out” houses in unbounded fashion has a negative impact on land and resources, and undermines a sense of community.

Once again, such ideas resonate today with the monikers of missing‑middle housing, compact development, and other buzzwords of land‑use reform.

“The most educative thing for any community is to have a vision of what might be.”

The final article suitably turned from analysis to advocacy. Mumford reiterated that laws alone cannot create a good city, an adage relevant to regulatory reform efforts in every era.

From Mumford’s perspective, community transformation happened through shared vision and public education. Today, this perspective translates to co-creation and stakeholder participation. Both Santa Fe’s pending code and plan updates must address this perspective through robust implementation of the Santa Fe Forward approach, the multi-organization Santa Fe Data Platform, and Housing for Santa Fe Coalition Platform (“Protect, Invest and Permit”).

Mumford’s chief examples were more history-based, but the underlying principles provide lessons learned. He cited Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, and attributed much of its success to “a civic book” — Wacker’s Manual — used in schools, which he said gave Chicagoans ownership of the City Beautiful plan.

He urged Santa Fe to develop its vision, teach it widely, and empower citizens to imagine alternatives to car‑dependence and sprawl. Frustrations with leaders or lack thereof are a now-familiar refrain that some of the advocacy organizations have taken up, as noted above.

Mumford had another example — the Amana colonies in Iowa as of the early 1960s. He said an elder explained their then-decline as follows: “We have had no leader with inspiration for the last 50 years.” Hence, another gem from Mumford that seems universal: Communities need leaders with courage and vision, not just administrators. He challenged Santa Fe to fight federal programs that undermined local needs — particularly those then biased toward low‑density suburbs.

Ultimately, he said, a city’s health depends on civic education, imagination, and continuous renewal. Sound familiar?

More than six decades after Mumford’s visit, Santa Fe — and other cities — still grapple with the questions he raised. Now, a new generation of stakeholders and outside thought leaders restate these questions in modern terms. And the truth is, much of what he forewarned came true.

Santa Fe’s human-scaled core still draws admirers and awards. Its edges have sprawled and its citizens wrestle with affordability, equity, and aesthetics — perhaps in ways far worse than Mumford imagined. Some blame the Santa Fe Style.

In the end, Mumford’s words are key, as they can still guide us today. They suggest that answers lie in social oases, contextual design, sustainable density, and shared civic vision. I may be old-fashioned, but in my immersion, I’m still listening to what he had to say.

• New Mexico Architect, Vol. 4, No. 6 (1962): “Conversations in Santa Fe with Lewis Mumford.” The first installment of Mumford’s visit.
• New Mexico Architect, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1963): “Conversations in Santa Fe with Lewis Mumford.” The Solnit–Meem debate.
• New Mexico Architect, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1963): “Conversations in Santa Fe with Lewis Mumford.” The third installment.
• New Mexico Architect, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1963): “Conversations in Santa Fe with Lewis Mumford.” The fourth installment.
• Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (1997). A detailed exploration of Santa Fe’s architectural evolution and its cultural contradictions.

• Santa Fe
• Lewis Mumford
• Urban Planning
• Urbanism

Don’t let the appetizing description fool you. When planetary scientists say the interior of Mars resembles a rocky road brownie more than a piece of buttery shortbread, the tasty metaphor masks billions of years of geological violence. In a re-examination of previous observations collected by NASA’s decommissioned InSight probe, researchers have discovered that the Martian mantle is embedded with ancient fragments measuring as much as 2.5 miles wide. The data is detailed in a study published on August 28 in Nature.

The solar system’s terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) first formed around 4.5 billion years ago, but the final geological results are far from uniform. On Earth, plate tectonics are continuously (if slowly) recycling between the crust and mantle. Mars is in a comparatively more stagnant situation. The Red Planet’s mantle is permanently trapped beneath an unmoving outer crust preserving the planet’s insides.

However, this peaceful present is only the result of the planet’s past cataclysmic events. Using InSight’s array of seismic detection tools, a team of planetary scientists have identified gigantic formations that break up comparatively smoother regions of mantle. These bits of planet are like the nuts and marshmallows in the rocky road brownie. Millions of years later, they serve as the leftover evidence from multiple catastrophic impacts by planet-sized objects–the same type of culprit likely responsible for smacking into Earth and generating our moon. 

According to study co-author Constantinos Charalambous, these events generated enough energy to melt massive portions of the then-young planet into seas of magma.

“As those magma oceans cooled and crystallised, they left behind compositionally distinct chunks of material—and we believe it’s these we’re now detecting deep inside Mars,” he explained in a statement.

Charalambous says these collisions likely took place during the first 100 million years of Mars’ existence, and are a testament to how inert the planet is today.

“The fact that we can still detect its traces after four-and-a-half billion years shows just how sluggishly Mars’s interior has been churning ever since,” he said.

Study co-author Tom Pike called this process “fractal distribution,” which occurs when a collision “overwhelms the strength of an object.”

“You see the same effect when a glass falls onto a tiled floor as when a meteorite collides with a planet: it breaks into a few big shards and a large number of smaller pieces,” he said. “It’s remarkable that we can still detect this distribution today.”

The InSight lander registered the seismic waves of eight separate marsquakes as it traveled through the Red Planet’s mantle. Two of the events were the result of a pair of meteorite impacts that each created a 492-foot-wide crater. As these waves made their way into Mars, InSight flagged sizable interference.

“That’s consistent with a mantle full of structures of different compositional origins—leftovers from Mars’s early days,” said Charalambous.

The discoveries have ramifications beyond Earth’s nearest neighbor. While our home planet is far more geologically active, the other rocky planets may resemble Mars beneath their own crusts. Better understanding the Martian mantle may help future investigations of other worlds.

“What happened on Mars is that, after those early events, the surface solidified into a stagnant lid,” Charalambous said. “It sealed off the mantle beneath, locking in those ancient chaotic features—like a planetary time capsule.”

The post Inside Mars, a ‘rocky road’ mantle reveals a violent past appeared first on Popular Science.