Tuesday 9 October 2012

Are there volcanoes on other planets?

Are there volcanoes on other planets?                                                                  Olympus Mons - Mars
·         Dead volcanoes are found on Venus, Earth and its Moon, and Mars. Active volcanoes are located on Earth, Jupiters Io, and possibly on Venus, on Saturn’s Titan, and on Neptunes Triton. Terrestrial and outer space volcanoes share some common properties.

·         Mars also has many distinctively volcanic features, including the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, which towers 16 miles high over the Martian landscape. "If volcanism had occurred up until the last 1% of geologic time, it is very unlikely to have stopped," McEwen says. "We just haven't observed anything that is a smoking gun on either Mars or Venus.”

·         Volcanoes also shaped Mercury. There, however, the activity appears to have stopped operating early in the planet's history, billions of years ago. On our moon, too, volcanism operated early and then shut off sometime around 3 billion years ago.

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