"Dwarfing Mount Everest" --Mars' Olympus Mons

 

          

 

Rising above the Red Planets frequent dust storms is the Olympus Mons -the tallest known volcano and mountain in our solar system. The central edifice of this shield volcano stands 27 kilometers ( 88,580 ft) high above the surface -or three times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level and 2.6 times the height of Mauna Kea above its base. It is 550 km in width, flanked by steep cliffs, and has a caldera complex that is 85 km long, 60 km wide, and up to 3 km deep with six overlapping pit craters. Its outer edge is defined by an escarpment up to 6 km tall; unique among the shield volcanoes of the Red Planet.

In 2004, the Express orbiter imaged old lava flows on the flanks of Olympus Mons. Based on crater size and frequency counts, the surface of this western scarp has been dated from 115 million years in age down to a region that is only 2 million years old -very recent in geological terms, suggesting that the mountain may yet have some ongoing volcanic activity.

Mauna Kea on the Hawaiian Islands is an example of similar shield volcanoes on a smaller scale. The extraordinary size of Olympus Mons is likely because does not have tectonic plates. Thus, the crust remained fixed over a hotspot and the volcano continued to discharge lava.

 The mountain, as well as a few other of the volcanoes in the Tharsis region, was visible from Earth to 19th century observers. The astronomer Patrick Moore points out that during dust storms, "Schiaparelli had found that his Nodus Gordis and Olympic Snow were almost the only features to be seen.

But only with the Mariner probes could this be confirmed with certainty. After the Mariner 9 probe had photographed it from orbit in 1972, it became clear that the altitude was much greater than that of any mountain found on Earth, and the name was changed to Olympus Mons.

 

          

Image credit: NASA

Comments

[dr burke]

Don't know why Nasa doesn't turn Olympus Mons, into a space port? being so high, 88,500+ feet
or 16 miles up, it would be a perfect land spot and use less fuel to get down. Plus, it would
be above the Martian storms. Plus, could dig in for buried space habitat. PLUS, they could almost
sail to any destination within a few hundred miles, using lighter than air dirigibles. A telescope
mounted on the rim, to see forever. I think the cost benefits alone, should colonize Olympus Mons.

[Tosca Zraikat]

"The extraordinary size of Olympus Mons is likely because does not have tectonic plates". Wait a minute! Didn't you recently post an article about evidence of tectonic activity on Mars? Don't these guys talk to each other?

[ur maa]

dr burke: you may find that someone or something has already beaten NASA to it...

tosca: yeah, i noticed how this conflicts that recent piece on tectonics on mars. one of the two must be wrong. i wonder what the implications of that are.

unless - to link these two post-responses, olympus mons was an artificially created structure... in the future mankind might make use of a planet's interior energy source by creating volcanoes this way.

[Relentless]

@ Tosca

Well, what if both are right... The one talking about plate tectonics on Mars mentioned verrrry slow moving plates, and the other could have meant no tectonic plates like the ones on Earth, which, in the oceanic plate case, take no more than 180 million years to form and destroy themselves by entrenchment.

Also, the one citing tectonic plates as very likely only mentioned Valles Marineris as a plate boundary region, where-as the giant shield volcanoes of Mars are located far away from that. So, like the hot-spots in the Mantles that created Hawaii and Yellowstone, it takes tens of millions of years on Earth for the hot spot to move any significant distance, on Mars, that could be billions, also taking into account that the Martian crust is many times thicker than Earth's and that Olympus Mons is so huge in diameter, the shaft of the volcano could have shifted only slightly over such insane amounts of time or could have been locked into place just because of how thick the Martian crust is. Well, it's just my idea.

Plate tectonics on Mars, even more boring than trying to keep up with distance updates on Voyager 1 for the next 40,000 years.

[marsy]

i love the idea of using it for a spaceport but (according to wikipedia at least) Olympus Mons isn't actually safe above the storms--- and instead sits in one of the dustiest areas of the planet and is itself covered with a fine mantle ready to kick up into a swirling mess.