Elysium Planitia, a flat-smooth plain just north of the Martian equator, is underlain by an 4,000-km-diameter active mantle plume, according to new research by scientists from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. An artist’s impression of an active mantle plume — a large blob of warm and buoyant rock — rising from deep inside Mars and pushing up Elysium Planitia, a plain within the planet’s northern lowlands....
