Twenty-two kilometres straight up — on Mars.
Twenty-two kilometres straight up — on Mars. That's Olympus Mons, a volcano so absurdly tall that Mount Everest would barely register as a bump at its base. Stack Everest two and a half times and you're still not at the summit.
But the height isn't even the strangest part. Its base stretches roughly 600 kilometres across — wide enough to cover an entire country. You could drive for days across its slopes and the horizon would look completely flat.
This is what happens when a planet has no tectonic plates. On Earth, a hot spot punches through the crust, the plate moves on, and a chain of smaller volcanoes forms. On Mars, the crust stays put. The lava just keeps piling up in the same spot, quietly, over billions of years.
Olympus Mons didn't explode into existence. It simply never had a reason to stop growing.
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