A preponderance of boulder tracks on the red planet may be evidence of recent seismic activity.

A study of these ephemeral features on Mars, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, says that such boulder tracks can be used to pinpoint recent seismic activity on the red planet.

This new evidence that Mars is a dynamic world runs contrary to the notion that all of the planet’s exciting geology happened much earlier, said Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who was not involved in the study.

Vijayan and his collaborators spotted more than 4,500 such boulder tracks, the longest of which stretched over a mile and a half.

Such changing tracks are likely evidence that a boulder disintegrated mid-fall and that its offspring continued bouncing downslope.

Vijayan and his colleagues nicknamed “boulder fall ejecta,” is kicked out each time a boulder impacts the surface, the researchers propose.

And that boulder fall material is transient: By tracing the same tracks in images obtained at different times, the team found that boulder fall ejecta tends to remain visible for only about four to eight years.

Because boulder fall ejecta fades so rapidly, seeing it implies that a boulder was dislodged recently, the team suggest.

Vijayan and his collaborators found that roughly 30 percent of the boulder tracks in their sample with boulder fall ejecta were concentrated in the Cerberus Fossae region of Mars.