Olympus Mons, on Mars. The base of this volcano covers a land area roughly equal to the size of the American state of Missouri. The height is almost two and a half times the height of Mt. Everest.
@Phantome Interesting. Mars has no magnetic field, because unlike Earth it has no hot molten core. The planet is small enough that the core solidified long ago. So it would be surprising to me if there was still hot lava below the surface.
But, I do not claim to be a professional planetary scientist. I am not. There may very well be something I've missed in my haphazard reading about Mars.
@SW-User It's a "shield volcano". Not the kind that erupts out of the crater. That region of Mars is called the "Tharsis bulge". You can see other , smaller, shield volcanoes in the picture.
The thinking is that this is where, in the distant past, magma was welling up from below the surface and created a large upland area. These shield volcanoes were spots where lava oozed out of their sides building up into the form we see today.
At least, that is the conclusion that geologists have made while studying the area. There are shield volcanoes on Earth as well, and the pattern on Mars looks familiar to geologists. I am not a geologist, so I will defer to them.
@CantExplain In ancient times, Ooranus was simply the name of the sky deity, who with Gaia the Earth goddess, got everything going in the era before the Olympian gods came to be.
(Sorry, I've heard too many Uranus jokes by now! lol)
