It should be easy to recognize a volcano. They stand high above the surrounding land, a singular cone which couldn’t really be anything else. Of course, they may not stay that way. Erosion may destroy the shape. A big explosion may replace the cone with a crater. Or there may never have been a cone,…
The Martian is a fascinating book by Andy Weir. It is about an astronaut who is accidentally (we hope) left behind on Mars during an emergency evacuation. What follows is a struggle for life, where science, engineering and agriculture(!) are used to keep the astronaut alive long enough to allow for a rescue attempt. There…
There are eight planets in our Solar System. Of the eight planets three of them have silicate, probably active, volcanism. Mars, Earth and Venus. It is very insightful to compare the volcanism between these three planets in order to find out more about how Earth’s own volcanoes work. Yet I find that extra-terrestrial volcanism is…
This story follows on from Henrik’s trilogy on the future exploration of Olympus Mons, which can be found at Mars 2067, the Olympus Mons Expedition (Part I, Part II and Part III). Henrik provided the characters and the ideas for why Arsia Mons would need to be explored. The crew gazed out of the windows…
This far, the expedition had been a highly successful failure. Five weeks into the exploration with three weeks of intense survey had brought a wealth of data, but not what they had come for. Olympus Mons or Nix Olympica, the Olympic Snows as it was formerly known, had stubbornly refused to accede to human wishes.…
In spite of its incredible height, Olympus Mons was well below the horizon as seen from ‘Olympia’, just like that Earthly committee as shorn of imagination as it was endowed with political acumen which had originally named the colony Mars Base Alpha. The residents had immediately renamed it in honour of the largest volcano in…