A 280-mile-long volcano may have been discovered

on Mars—hiding in plain sight

The colossal volcano is taller than Mount Everest, would reach from New York City to
Washington, D.C., and may be a promising site to look for ancient remnants of microbial life.
By Robin George Andrews

March 20, 2024

It’s not every day you discover a brand-new gigantic volcano on another planet—but that’s
exactly what a pair of researchers claim to have done. At almost 30,000 feet tall (a little
higher that Everest), and perhaps 280 miles long at its base (lengthier than the distance
between Washington D.C. and New York City), it is an utter behemoth. Like all volcanoes on
Mars, there are no signs that’s it’s currently active. And it could be remarkably ancient—a
volcanic witness to most of the Red Planet’s multi-billion-year history.
“We were both in disbelief that this was indeed a giant volcano and that no one seemed to
have reported it before,” says Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, one of
the two co-discoverers. “I think it's fair to say that we were excited.”
Lee and his colleague presented their findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science
Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, last week. Found overlaying an expansive maze of
water-eroded caverns and tunnels named Noctis Labyrinthus—meaning “Maze of the
Night”—the team have given their putative volcano the provisional name of Noctis, pending
further analyses by the scientific community. The volcanic architecture has been heavily
eroded by eons of water and glacial movement, which they claim is why Noctis has been
overlooked until now.
Mars’s magmatic past

Not everyone agrees that a colossal volcano has truly been discovered. The work has yet to
be peer-reviewed, but those who saw the presentation at the conference are intrigued, but
skeptical.
“The researchers made an interesting case, but it is not entirely convincing,” says Rosaly
Lopes, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wasn’t involved with
the new work. “The area is highly eroded. It is difficult to tell for sure.” But, she adds, “I
think most of us still think it is an interesting idea and worthy of more study.”

Mars was once a volcanically active world, featuring myriad explosive and effusive
eruptions—and the construction of some truly elephantine volcanoes, including the famous
Olympus Mons, which is three times taller than Everest. It’s so weighty, it even sank back
into the planet a little.
Even though there are some tantalizing signs that future eruptions on the planet may occur,
most scientists suspect Earth’s neighbor is past its eruptive heyday. And although small
clusters of volcanic features are occasionally found by eagle-eye researchers, it’s presumed
that the larger edifices have all be identified. Mars has an essentially transparent
atmosphere, and aside from the odd global dust storm, its surface has been near-
continuously perused by orbiting spacecraft, going back to NASA’s Mariner 9 satellite that
arrived above the ochre world in 1971.

So when Lee, and fellow team member Sourabh Shubham, a Ph.D. student at the University
of Maryland, claimed to have discovered a giant volcano, it came as a surprise.
Searching for an ancient volcano

Using a suite of orbital mission maps created over the past half-century, they focused on a
field of deposits created by explosive volcanic activity, one that had been incised by the
remains of a glacier. Wondering where this volcanic material may have erupted from, they
looked nearby, to the eastern extent of Noctis Labyrinthus, and “we saw something
remarkable,” says Lee: the shape of what they think is an eroded volcano, topped with a
cauldron-like pit at its partly collapsed peak, and adorned with old lava flows, blankets of
volcanic ash, and mineral patches cooked up by magmatically heated flowing water.
Based on the advanced extent of its erosion, the layering of its erupted matter, and
comparing its fractures with those of Noctis Labyrinthus (whose formation time is broadly
known), they suspect the volcano first took shape more than 3.7 billion years ago, then
effervesced and erupted perhaps as recently as 10 million years ago.
“We are looking at a volcano whose activity spans the bulk of Mars' geologic history,” says
Lee. And the presence of a prolonged heat source in an area known to have been adorned
with glaciers also implies that this may be an exciting area for a future rover to explore—a
former site of warm pools within which a robotic sleuth may find signs of past microbial life.
Despite Lee’s confidence, though, others aren’t convinced. The features identified as
eruption deposits or volcanic landforms aren’t unequivocally volcanic, and it isn’t yet clear
how continuous or not they are.
“This is not enough to convince me this is a volcano,” says Tracy Gregg, a planetary
volcanologist at the University at Buffalo. “An impact crater that was filled and eroded could
show similarities.”
While the possibility of a titanic overlooked volcano on Mars is tantalizing, more evidence is
needed to confirm if this is truly an explosive new discovery.