How are volcanoes found on Earth and other planets and their moons
different? For example Jupiter's satellite Io? Mars?
Srivatsa
Hi Srivatsa,
As far as we can tell, the volcanoes of Mars and Venus appear to be
basaltic shield volcanoes. We know more about Martian volcanoes than
Venusian ones. There are a few candidates on Mars that might be similar
to strato volcanoes but by far most of them are shield volcanoes. And
what shield volcanoes they are!! Olympus Mons, the biggest one, is about
29 km high (compared to Mauna Loa, which is "only" 9 km high. The easiest
explanation for this is that Mars doesn't have plate tectonics. Instead
of spreading the productivity of one hotspot out along a chain of
volcanoes as on Earth, all the erupted lava goes into the same volcano.
This causes them to be really big.
The volcanoes on Io seem to look kind of like shield volcanoes, but there
is a lot of disagreement about what the erupting lava is made of. It was
initially thought that perhaps it is molten sulfur, but there are folks
now who think that instead it is more like basalt. Hopefully the
upcomming fly-by of the Gallileo spacecraft will answer this and many
other questions. I'm sure there must be a NASA-afilliated web page that
discusses the Gallileo project in great detail.
Sincerely,
Scott Rowland
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