1. Mars vs Earth
Planetary showdown of the ages:
Volcanic style
2. Mar’s biography
• Mars formed 4.6 billion years ago, within the same
time as Earth’s formation.
• Mars is the second smallest planet, and about half the
size of Earth.
• Mars has the largest volcanoes of any of the eight
planetary bodies, including their satellites
• It has the second highest number of volcanoes;
Venus has the most.
• Mars’s gravity is only 38% of Earth’s, which results in
its large volcanoes
4. Mar’s Composition
• Maintains similar geologically stratified levels as
Earth, but has larger crust relative to size
• Core is mostly iron with a small amount of nickel
• Does not have tectonic plate movements, unlike
Earth
• However, Tharsis rise (uplift bulging in western
hemisphere) indicates that some divergence must
have happened within the crust
• No distinct land and oceanic features;
instead, the topography varies differently
6. Volcanism on Mars
• Because
Mars has such large and distinct
volcanoes, different provinces were
demarcated:
• Tharsis Volcanic (Western hemisphere)
• Elysium Volcanic Provinces (West of
Tharsis)
• Other notable volcanoes include:
• Syrtis Major
• Highland Paterae
7. Mars
• Olympus Mon
• The caldera
• Tharsis Ridge
• Ascaraeus Mons
• Pavonis Mons
• Arsia Mons
8. Olympus Mons
• Of all the volcanoes on Mars, the tallest volcano is
Olympus Mons:
• Located in Tharsis volcanic province (western
hemisphere of Mars)
• Shield volcano
• 21 km high and 550 km across
• 100 times greater in volume than Earth’s largest
shield volcano: Mauna Loa
• Roughly the size of Missouri
• Formed from continental hotspot
• When it was active, it had spewed large amounts
of gas into the atmosphere, inferring that Mars
once had a thick amotsphere
12. Reasons for Mars’s Large
Volcanoes
• Volcanoes of such magnitude were able to form on
Mars is because the hot volcanic regions in the
mantle remained fixed relative to the surface for
hundreds of millions of years.
• Mars no longer has active tectonic plate activity,
which allows volcanoes to be active for centuries
without tectonic disturbance
• Due to no movement of crustal drifting, the volcanic
hot spot remains under the same mountain resulting
in extremely large mountains, such as Olympus Mons
• Mars have deeper and larger magma chambers, due
to having less gravitational buoyancy on magma
13. The Hotspots
• Volcanoes on Mars are much wider and taller than
Earths, but have similar ratios of height to base radius
14. Tectonic Movement and formation
of Volcanoes on Mars
• Mars is a much smaller geologically active
world than Earth
• It is less tectonically active, it does not have any
drifting tectonic plates
• Mars does not have crustal drift, the volcanic
hot spot remains under the same mountain
resulting in extremely large mountains, such as
Olympus Mons
15. Tectonic Plate Movement and
Formation of Volcanoes on Earth
• Most volcanoes form near convergent
plate boundaries, such as the Pacific Ring
of Fire (68% of Earth’s Volcanoes)
• Earth’s hot spot theory on volcano
formation
• Oceanic divergent plate boundaries
• Continental convergent plate boundaries
• Earths “hotspots”
16. Mars
•Red areas shows the North magnetic fields
•Blue areas shows the South magnetic fields
17. Citations
• Hamilton, C. (1995). Martian volcanoes. Retrieved from
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/marsvolc.htm
• Tayfun Oner, A. (1997). Retrieved from
http://www.solarviews.com/cap/mars/voly1.htm
• Greetings from mars. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast121/lectures/lec12.html
• Wilson, Lionel; Head, James W. (1994). "Mars: Review and Analysis of
Volcanic Eruption Theory and Relationships to Observed Landforms". Rev.
Geophys. 32(3): 221–263
• Solomon, Sean C.; Head, James W. (1982). "Evolution of the Tharsis
Province of Mars: The Importance of Heterogeneous Lithospheric
Thickness and Volcanic Construction". J. Geophys. Res. 87 (B12): 9755–
9774.
