. In addition to the escarpment around Olympus Mons, Hildenbrand and his colleagues report signs of a similar escarpment on another Martian volcano, Alba Mons, which lies about 1000 miles to the northeast—suggesting this, too, was caused by hot lava flowing into the sea.
“That sort of thing would have a fairly immense signal in the gravity field, and I really can’t discern it in the gravity field data that we have,” he says.Olympus Mons today covers an area about the size of Arizona. Scientists think it’s so big because the gravity on Mars is only about a third of that on Earth and because the volcanic plume that created it has been very active over the eons.
He says that what are interpreted as ancient shorelines in parts of the northern highlands could be evidence of an ocean there in the distant past, or maybe: the first about 3.8 billion years ago, and another as recently as three billion years ago. He notes that a similar escarpment on the north side of Alba Mons, which the authors think also may have been caused by molten lava flowing into the sea, is less than three miles above the nearby plain, lower than the escarpment on Olympus Mons. In that case, it may be that the initial depression or the subsequent uplift was not as great, he says.
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