The Best Volcanoes in Our Solar System, Ranked

Earth’s highest mountain, Mauna Kea, from base to tip stands 33,500 feet high– more than a mile taller than Everest.

Mauna Kea is found on the Big Island in Hawaii and is a spiritual area that holds considerable cultural significance to native Hawaiians. Its snowy peak is topped with a suite of observatories that assist astronomers peer throughout deep space.

Maat Mons is Venus’s highest volcano. This radar image of the volcano was taken in 1991 by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft. Covered in spots of dark lava, the approximately four-mile-high guard volcano definitely sticks out on the piping hot world.

The volcano gets its name, Maat, from the Egyptian goddess of fact, justice, and consistency and Mons for the latin word for mountain.

You check out that. Ice volcanoes. These frozen functions throughout the surface area of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, have actually enticed researchers because their icy plumes were very first identified in 2005. Cryovolcanoes on Enceladus’s surface area are believed to spray jets of water vapor, ice, and a mystical mix of gases into area.

Enceladus is likewise really small. The moon has a size of roughly 310 miles throughout. It’s smaller sized than Olympus Mons, speaking of which …

Mars’ Olympus Mons is the biggest volcano in the planetary system. It’s around 374 miles throughout (approximately the size of Arizona), 16 miles high, and has a 50-mile-wide crater at its top.

Lava streams stretch even more on Mars thanks to the lower surface area gravity and high eruption frequency. Researchers think the volcano has actually been inactive for a minimum of 2 million years due to the fact that there isn’t proof of current volcanic lava close by.

These pixelated images each taken 45 minutes by Voyager 2 in 1989 reveals the five-mile-high plume of an active cryovolcano on Neptune’s moon Triton.

At the time, researchers believe that the big, dark cloud of particles most likely consisted of frozen nitrogen and methane, according to the Chicago TribuneStill, scientists are confusing over the strange moon, even as current innovation has actually enabled them to examine the images in even higher information.

Mars’ biggest volcanic area includes not one, not 2, however 3 different volcanoes strung along the surface area of the red world. Tharsis Montes is made up of 3 inactive guard volcanoes called Arsia, Pavonis, and Ascraeus Mons, each of which are 220 to 250 miles in size and approximately 44 miles apart.

This imagetaken by NASA’s Viking orbiter, was launched in 1998 and likewise reveals Mars’ biggest single volcano, Olympus Mons, in the upper left corner.)

Since NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft zipped previous Pluto in 2015, researchers have actually been feverishly examining images of the dwarf world.

It has yet to be verified, lots of researchers think this image of a 90-mile-wide function taken in Pluto’s southern hemisphere might be proof of cryovolcanism on the previous world. If so, this function– called Wright Mons after the popular leaflets– would be the biggest recognized volcano in the external planetary system.

Loki Patera is an active lava lake on the surface area of Jupiter’s moon, Io. It was very first found by Voyager 1 in 1979, and has actually been fascinating researchers since.

The 125-mile-wide Loki Patera emerges in routine periods, roughly every 540 Earth days. Its last eruption remained in May 2018, so researchers forecast the next eruption ought to be on its method.

Feeling starving?

Venus’s pancake volcanoes are amongst the strangest functions in the planetary system. Pancake dome volcanoes are called after the precious breakfast food due to the fact that of their flat, circular shape. The viscosity (stickiness) and weight of their lava streams are believed to provide this odd shape. The domes in this image are approximately 40 miles wide.

This specific group of Venusian pancake volcanoes is called Carmenta Farra and was imaged by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in 1991.