Roughly 4 billion years ago, a region of the red planet called Arabia Terra experienced thousands of powerful and explosive volcanic super-eruptions that filled the atmosphere with so much dust and toxic gases that each one would have altered the Martian climate for decades at a time.

Although it was a long time ago that Arabia Terra experienced this activity, Whelley and his team were able to uncover the evidence on the Martian surface from data recovered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).

Another paper suggested that the Arabia Terra terrain could contain ash deposits from ancient eruptions; and yet another worked out the effect the Martian atmosphere would have had on ash dispersal.

"We picked it up at that point and said, 'OK, well, these are minerals that are associated with altered volcanic ash, which has already been documented, so now we're going to look at how the minerals are distributed to see if they follow the pattern we would expect to see from super eruptions'," said volcanologist Alexandra Matiella Novak of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

And, finally, the predicted volume of volcanic fallout allowed the team to figure out how many individual eruptions there had been - and it's huge, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 over half a billion years.

So why should Arabia Terra appear to exclusively host volcanic monsters?