Month: December 2022

Enlarge / One of the rifts in the Cerebrus Fossae area, potentially created by the stretching of the crust driven by a mantle plume. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

The Mars InSight lander included the first seismograph placed on the red planet, and it has picked up everything from marsquakes to impacts and provided lots of new information on Mars' interior. But perhaps its most striking finding has been that almost all of Mars' seismic activity appears to originate from a single location, a site called Elysium Planitia.

That area is also the site of the most recent volcanic activity we've detected on Mars. In a paper released this week, scientists argue that both derive from a single source: a plume of hot material rising through the mantle. It's the sort of geological activity that creates hotspots like Iceland and Yellowstone on Earth, but it had been thought that Mars had cooled too much to support those activities.

Building a case

Elysium Planitia is a generally flat region covering roughly a million square kilometers. It's just at the edge of Mars' northern lowlands, but it sits nearly a kilometer above them. Many of its features are old, including a series of ridges thought to be caused by the compression of Mars' interior as it cooled. But it also has signs of recent volcanic activity, though not nearly as much as the nearby Tharsis region, which contains Mars' largest volcanoes.

Enlarge (credit: Scharon Harding)

I was treated to a welcome surprise when I first laid eyes on the latest Dell XPS 13 (9315). The color options—a youthful sky blue or a unique purplish brown—are visual candy in a PC world dominated by shimmery silvers, grown-up grays, and boring blacks. Dell's 2022 XPS 13 doesn't compromise by offering a more traditional colorway for cheaper, as prior XPS 13 laptops did, either.

After I moved past appearances, I found there was more to enjoy under the hood. While this machine isn't as wild of a redesign as the one given to the costlier Dell XPS 13 Plus, the company did some tinkering to make the XPS 13 lighter and thinner than ever, all while accommodating quality-of-life upgrades like better speakers and a bigger battery. Unfortunately, it has a dreadfully limited and dongle-dependent port selection.

There are flashier alternatives for a thin-and-light laptop, but the 2022 XPS 13 is an admirable clamshell with more to offer than a couple of unique hues.