The Solar System’s largest mountain – a Martian shield volcano the size of Italy rising 26 km above its surrounding plains, with a mean elevation of 22 km and a caldera 3 km deep.

Olympus Mons - the mother of all mountains from Robin Edwards on Vimeo.

The elevation data is from Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), visualised here in 2.5D using simple lines – a technique used in 1970 by astronomer Harold Craft (later popularised on the cover of the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures), but adding a colour scale to complement y-axis extrusion. The animation was created in R with ggplot2.

[Previously published at geotheory.co.uk]