Olympus Mons is a volcano on Mars, and the most important volcano we learn about any place within the Sun Device.
Positioned just about the Martian equator, within the planet’s western hemisphere, Olympus Mons stands an excellent 21km above the Mars world datum (the identical of ‘sea stage’ for a waterless planet), and in puts towers over its native setting by means of up to 26km.
By the use of comparability, right here on Earth, Mount Everest stands roughly 8.8km above sea stage, whilst the sector’s tallest volcano, Chile’s Nevados Ojos del Salado, stands simply 6.8km prime.
A view of Olympus Mons, the most important volcano within the Sun device, as observed by means of the Viking Orbiter. Credit score: NASA/JPL/USGS
No longer simply tall, however massive
And Olympus Mons isn’t simply tall – it’s wide, too.
In reality, it has a floor space of a few 300,000 km2 (120,000 sq mi) – that’s kind of the dimensions of Poland or Italy!
That’s as a result of, just like the volcanoes that make up the islands of Hawaii, Olympus Mons is a protect volcano.
Symbol of Olympus Mons, the tallest and biggest volcano within the Sun Device, captured by means of ESA’s Mars Specific and processed by means of Andrea Success. Credit score: Credit score: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck
This implies it has broader, flatter profile – like a warrior’s protect mendacity at the floor – than the cinder cone, lava cone or lava dome varieties that most certainly spring extra straight away to thoughts while you pay attention the phrase ‘volcano’.
Defend volcanos shape when a fissure within the planetary floor oozes very fluid, low-viscosity lava, which has a tendency to unfold out additional and extra temporarily than the extra viscous lava related to different sorts of volcano.
Symbol of Mars volcano Olympus Mons, appearing frost in white-blue on most sensible. Captured by means of the Mars Specific orbiter. Credit score: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin
Why so large?
Olympus Mons lies on the center of a area of volcanic process known as Tharsis Upward thrust.
This process is brought about now not by means of the motion of tectonic plates – Mars is simply too small to have the ones – however somewhat by means of the presence, slightly under the skin, of an enormous magma hotspot.
It’s this that has enabled the volcano to succeed in its huge measurement.
Map of Mars’s best-known options, together with the positioning of Olympus Mons. Click on to amplify. Credit score: Paul Abel
Since its vulcanism isn’t matter to fluctuations over the years (on account of plate tectonics), layers of lava had been ready to increase in a single position over thousands and thousands of years – even supposing for the previous 25 million years or so, this Martian volcano has lain dormant.
The Martian volcano is visual from Earth via a telescope as an albedo function – a space of brightness – that used to be historically labelled Nix Olympica (Latin for ‘Olympic Snow’).
Astronomers had lengthy suspected this to be a mountainous area, but it surely wasn’t till NASA’s Mariner 9 spacecraft showed that topography in 1971, that Olympus Mons used to be given its present title.
In Latin, the title way ‘Mount Olympus’.
And in 2024, a find out about discovered that Mars’s equatorial volcanos comprise 60 Olympic swimming swimming pools’ price of frost.
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