Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here there's a thrill like no other to reaching the peak of a mountain and looking down at the landscape below. And it turns out that our highest mountains here on Earth are actually some of the smallest in our Solar system. So what is the tallest mountain in the Solar System? The answer, its location
and its monstrous size might surprise you. After all, there aren't that many other rocky planets and moons in the Solar System that are big enough to have a mountain larger than ours. But the tallest mountain in the Solar System is, in fact, Olympus Mons on Mars. This giant stratovolcano rises sixteen miles that's over eighty four thousand feet or twenty five kilometers above the surface of the red planet.
It's one of a dozen huge volcanoes on Mars. For comparison, the tallest volcano on Earth, Monacheia, is less than half that size, just six miles over thirty three thousand feet or ten kilometers high, and only two fifths of that can be seen above the surface of the ocean. Meanwhile, at the peak of Olympus Mons, a huge caldera or crater, stretches across some fifty miles or eighty kilometers wide, and the base of Olympus Mons is three hundred and forty miles.
That's five hundred and fifty kilometers wide. Basically the length of the state of Mississippi. Olympus Mons is more than twice as tall as Mount Everest, which might seem odd given that Mars is half Earth's size by diameter, and scientists hypothesized that Olympus Mons and its monstrous siblings grew so tall due to three different factors. First, Mars is a much more volcanically active planet than Earth. While Earth certainly had a period of intense volcanic activity long ago,
Mars has been much more volcanically active for longer. Additionally, the tectonic plates on Mars move more slowly than they do here on Earth. This allows huge mountains to form and remain, while giant mountains on Earth might be pushed under other tectonic plates, what paleontologists call the process of subduction or otherwise affected by tectonic activity. Finally, the pull of gravity on Mars is only about thirty eight percent as strong as it is on Earth due to differences
in the mass of each planet. Paleontologists believe this may allow mountains to grow taller on Mars, since gravity doesn't pull the magma down the same way that it does on Earth. These forces together have allowed Olympus Mons to form as the biggest mountain in the Solar System and remain that way for over the billions of years in our Solar systems history. So how do the tallest mountains of our planet staff up? It depends on how you
measure them. A Mount Everest is Earth's tallest mountain on land, rising nine thousand feet or eight thousand nine d. That actually doesn't make it the tallest mountain on the planet, though Monakea in Hawaii is considered the tallest when you measure it from the sea floor, rising again at thirty three thousand feet or ten kilometers. And if you want to get really technical, the tallest mountain from the center
of the Earth is Mount Chimborazzo. This strato volcano in Ecuador rises over two thousand, three hundred feet or seven taller than Monakea. This is due to the Earth's centrical bulge of the fact that the Earth is actually slightly wider near the equator. Today's episode is based on the article the tallest mountain in the Solar System is much higher than Everest on House to Forks dot com, written
by Valerie Stymach. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with House to fur dot com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H