The freshest cracks on a planet everyone thought was dead.
Cerberus Fossae is a set of near-parallel fissures slicing across the Elysium plains for more than 1,000 km. Some lava deposits here appear to be only tens of thousands of years old, and NASA's InSight lander traced its strongest marsquakes back to this exact spot.
Claim your plot here →Cerberus Fossae is a swarm of steep-walled cracks that opened as the crust stretched over the volcanic bulge of Elysium. What makes it extraordinary is its youth: some of the surrounding lava flows and a small ash-like deposit have been dated to as recently as ~50,000 years ago, geological yesterday on a world usually described as long dead.
The site earned global attention when InSight, listening to the ground from 2018 to 2022, traced its two largest marsquakes to Cerberus Fossae. That makes this the single best evidence that Mars is not fully frozen inside — molten rock may still be moving beneath these fissures today.
While Earth's youngest lava is measured in days, most of Mars is billions of years old — Cerberus Fossae is the rare exception that acts almost recent.