What sort of effect would be had on the world if there was a mountain tall enought to peak all they way through the...

This mountain would singlehandedly determine all weather on the planet. If the planet was spinning like Earth, you'd have consistent winds which would cause a rain shadow to develop on one side, while another side would have trapped moisture and likely jungles/rainforest on the opposing side. It would look different from our Everest because at a certain altitude, there would be no snow due to the extremely high winds and lack of moisture. The mountain would be rocky with trees at the bottom, then rocks, then snow a bit higher, sheer ice a bit higher, then lifeless rock from a threshold and upwards.

This mountain would shape all trade in that entire continent if not multiple continents. Think how the Himalayas totally isolated India for a huge amount of time, keeping most of their culture foreign to all other peoples.

My old DM had a feature of the world that was a mountain so tall it went into space. It was near the north pole, and was always surrounded by clouds so that no creature actually knew how tall it was since the top was obscured. Under the mountain was the stronghold of the dwarves, who were very rare everywhere else in the world. The top of the mountain supposedly went into the sky realm or the spirit world.

I will also point out that Olympus Mons is so fucking massive, you can't even tell it's a mountain. It's so huge that the curvature of mars actually disguises it's height, it looks like a hill on the horizon no matter where you are near it. You can't actually "see" it like a normal mountain.

Tell me more, really.
That sounds very interesting.

Please keep in mind that Mars has *practically* no atmosphere. 0.00592154 atm is the pressure at the surface of Mars (1 atm is Earth's pressure, 0.35 atm and below is death), and the peak of Olympus Mons is a near vacuum, so this doesn't get you much in terms of possible atmospheric effects, and on top of that Mars is dry as hell with almost no water vapor (even if water vapor accounted for 0.1% of the Martian atmosphere that would still only mean a partial pressure of 0.000005922 atm of water vapor).

Imagine a mountain/volcano the size of Arizona. ~375 miles across. You can only see ~15-20 miles at any given time on FLAT ground, meaning when you're looking towards the peak from any given point, you only see 5% of that entire mountain's actual height.

I thought they were being sarcastic, not stupid.

that pic is misleading, Olympus is so flat on the top that you wouldn't be able to tell you were on a mountain if you were on it. It's more like someone took a spoon and scooped away the land around it.

Shoudn't it look like a huge shadow upwards? Like a massive wall?

Or the curvature of the planet wouldn't allow for it?

you could hike up it. you would just be walking up a steep slope for days.

that is some serious alien 'geometry', honestly. I fucking love it. take it out of context, Just having a area of land that is always sloped, Always seemingly more along the horizon.

It's a very gentle grade once you clear the cliffs at its base. I'm not sure your brain would register you're on a slope.

Is there any sort of simulator or something where one could play with this sort of thing (like place a mountain range of this size on a place and then generate ground level views of it)?

the caldera 85km wide and 3 km deep. You would need to walk or drive up to get to the top, and then use your climbing equipment to climb DOWN to get to the center.

It doesn't block light because the shape is more like a HUGE shield laying face-up, rather than a big rocky spire.

As pointed out, OP's pic is totally incorrect about anything beyond height.

Now, if you were at the edge of Olympus Mons, there would be a shadow because there's a huge fucking cliff face all the way around it.

Wrong, it's not steep at that immense size

He's correct. Basically, Olympus Mons does not have the proportions of the Himalayas or even Rockies. It's a massive bulge that happens to be so massive it's extremely "tall" from "sea level"/"ground level"

Simple math and scaling could do that.

It would probably affect gravity strongly enough to pull a lot of the atmosphere with it.

Some of the descriptions here make clear that my mental model for mountains don't really scales up to this level.

Maybe I would need to re-read up on geometry of spheres and stuff?

TOp view

If you want to see some really crazy shit you should take a look at just about anything on Venus. Venus even has its own formations that astrogeologists had to invent a new category for just because they aren't seen anywhere outside of Venus:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnoid_(astrogeology)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_dome

Take a mountain twice the height of Everest but the same diameter. This mountain is super-Everest, the peak of which is beyond cloud formation.

Now make Everest six times higher, but only three times larger. You still have a visible mountain shape, but the mountain is actually so high that it creates immense shadows for extended periods of daytime hours, two thirds of the mountain is above cloud level, and the tip reaches beyond ozone levels.

Olympus Mons is just a fat bulge.

Venus is interesting because it isn't spinning like Earth is, and it's core is barely spinning either. Venus has a fairly weak electromagnetic field, but atmosphere is produced at immense rates so it maintains a thick layer instead of being stripped away like Mars was.

Yeah, Venus's atmosphere actually creates its own fake ionosphere just through the interaction between it and the solar wind, making radiation levels around 50km in its atmosphere to wind up being Earthlike. Oh, and on top of that the entire planet behaves like a comet.

nasa.gov/content/goddard/giant-holes-seen-in-venus-ionosphere

All hail the throne of the godds! All men who venture upwards are caught by the Watchers and smote for their arrogance in seeking to visit the home of the gods

>Olympus Mons is just a fat bulge.
Not even that, its a somewhat circular curved plate of rock with a hole in the center on top of the martian crust.

I wonder though if anyone here would be willing to make a render of what OP's hypothetical super-mountain would look like, from the ground and from space.

The volcanoes of Tharsis create clouds pretty often, though they are different than clouds we know due to the huge difference in atmospheres. These in pic are water ice clouds, and you can find many others like them.
Mars is a crazy bastard, all sorts of interesting giant features. google.co.uk/mars/ is a really easy place to see a bunch of them. The problem you can never really "get" the scale of them without seeing them in 3D or spending some time comparing the size of features to things you do know and trying to visualise the two together.
Other places also have their quirks, the various moons of the gas giants have some weird shit going on, Hyperion is a weird spongy blob that doesn't rotate (it tumbles instead), Iapetus (thats an i) has an equatorial ridge that reaches to 20km and the whole moon has a dark splodge on one side, Miranda has the largest cliff in the entire solar system at 5km high.

You're saying this like I wouldn't still take off my helmet anyway.

Enjoy your frostbite.

>Mars is a crazy bastard, all sorts of interesting giant features.
Looks like Texas has some competition.

Aparently olimpus mons is not the largest mountain in the solar system.
Vesta has a bigger one, by .1 kilometers
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheasilvia

A lot of dead climbers?

The Ringworld trilogy has a mountain called Fist-Of-God, which was caused by a moon-sized asteroid hitting the underside of the ring, and is ridiculously, massively massive.

Essentially it was just a gigantic landmark that all the locals within a few thousand kilometers prayed to

If you took your helmet off you'd get almost the exact same result as if you took it off in space.

it would probably be worshipped in some way..either directly or that the god or gods live on/in it.

hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu/PDS/EXTRAS/RDR/PSP/ORB_001700_001799/PSP_001760_2160/PSP_001760_2160_RED.browse.jpg

Mars gives no fucks

Nope, you wouldn't be as likely to get responses like or or in such a place.

>0.00592154 atm is the pressure at the surface of Mars
That is way too many significant digits for "the surface of Mars" without being more specific about place or time.

>You can only see ~15-20 miles at any given time on FLAT ground

That might be accurate for Earth (I don't know) but if it is, it probably isn't for Mars. I was idly thinking about how to calculate what the value would be for any arbitrary altitude and planet a few weeks ago, but all I managed to figure out was that I don't know as much trigonometry as I should.

>Simple math and scaling could do that.
Simple for you maybe, but not something most of us can easily grasp.

>What sort of effect would be had on the world if there was a mountain tall enough to peak all they way through the mesosphere?

Sadly, atmospheres don't work like that.

The mountain would be large enough that it would have enough gravity to hold a thick atmosphere on it's surface so it wouldn't be in the mesosphere. It would also need to, on an earth-sized world, be made of something MUCH tougher then stone. You'd need a carbon nanotube mountain.

Fuck what an excellent thread

Veeky Forums ALWAYS delivers on being the best board

>That is way too many significant digits for "the surface of Mars" without being more specific about place or time.

Sorry, that's just what you get when you convert 6 millibars to atmospheres. Mars's surface pressure is around 0.005 atm.

So what's the ballpark for highest possible Earth-rock mountain?

The entire fucking thread is nothing but dipshits who know nothing about geology, meteorology, and astromechanics and then finally you show up. Bravo. What should have been the first post; A MOUNTAIN THAT TALL CANNOT EXIST UNDER EARTH GRAVITY.

If you knew this why didn't you say anything?

It would probably have a fuckhuge root in the mantle
>You'd need a carbon nanotube mountain.
That's not true, you'd need something tough to build something tall and thin like space elevators and shit like that but if mountains form they form in a structurally sound configuration so they are always supported, that would mean that a mountain that high would be also pretty large like Olimpus Mons is
>it would have enough gravity to hold a thick atmosphere on it's surface
That's not true either, the gravitational anomaly of a mountain, no matter how big, wouldn't be enough. It would slightly shift the atmosphere but we are talking about a few dozens meters

Not with that attitude, it can't

Fuck you, user, I had plans today. Now I'm 5 tabs deep into wikipedia again.

Nice areola.

You're welcome.
Lightning everywhere that is unable to touch the ground so it dances between clouds.
300 km/h winds.
It snows lead, and rains acid.
Venus is the shit.

Venus is fucking metal, but a much better colonisation candidate than Mars.
Why?
FUCKING AIRSHIPS. Zeppelins! Fly through the clouds where the acid is weaker and the air thinner, and breathable air acts as a lifting gas.
Mars is just technically easier, and you don't have to explain to the press what happens if someone pops the dome. (It falls slowly as the outside atmosphere flows in.)

what-if.xkcd.com/54/

"Olympus Mons, and a few other volcanoes, remain above water. Surprisingly, they aren't even close to being covered. Olympus Mons still rises well over 10 kilometers above the new sea level."

Hey... user... do you have permission to display that presentment?

I imagine the side of the mountain facing the prevailing wind would be in almost perpetual rainfall, and the side opposite would cast a dessert hundreds of miles long

Shouldn't it's shadow move along the day?

Wouldn't it cover several kilometers with darkess?

>a dessert hundreds of miles long
That's a lot of pudding...

Zeppelins, while cool, are actually the more challenging aspect of colonization which sadly puts Venus likely on par with Mars in terms of initial R&D investment needed (likely more of an initial investment because of the amount of data we already have on Mars). The biggest benefits of Venus as the more practical colonization choice would be:

Its abundant energy, with that not having to ship power plants is a massive bonus in mass savings

Its abundant solar energy, with that you can have practical solar powered electric travel with either a more field ready high powered hall thruster or the fancier, significant mass saving, FARAD or ELF pulsed thrusters.

Its lower travel times resulting in safer radiation dosages and less medical issues

Its lower delta v required for transfers (another significant bonus for electric thrusters which take significantly longer the more you pile on delta v).

Its far more frequent launch windows resulting in less backup mass necessary

Also, a bonus for the impatient even with standard hohmann transfers you could perform an entire crewed Venus mission, from Earth to Venus and back to Earth, with in a year.

More like dry tapioca powder

I love this thread and maybe need to change my world building around, but can I get some help?

Olympus Mons looks like a huge plateau (I realize it is not that). Regarding the crazy winds--would those be going directionally around it, as well as over it? Are the sides super steep?

What impact would that size geographical item have in an atmosphere?

>It would almost certainly be the subject of universal mythological/religious significance, as the peak would be entirely inaccessible prior to late industrial-era technology.

The first ever(as far as we know) ascent to the peak of Mt. Everest by a person who lived to tell about it was in 1953.

Everest is actually a fairly easy mountain to climb, compared to some.
K2, the next-highest peak is much harder. Everyone and their dog can climb Everest, at least when all the ropes aren't gone. K2 kills a significan percentage of the people who attempt it, nobody's climbed one side of it in winter and lived, and the locals didn't even name it because it's too damn remote.

I would like to point out that depending on the age of the mountain, there may very well be life at the top. Maybe not complex life, but definitely some extremeophiles.

if it was a volcano the crater could probly sustain life, if it stays warm somehow
I have no proper education to back this up. going off of magma vents at the bottom of the ocean having shit grow around them

You don't want to know.

Too many other variables to judge. If it's a global desert like Mars, then the winds would be pretty constant and directional, but if it's a wet planet like Earth you could get all kinds of complex weather cycles driven by the mountain, maybe even something like Jupiter's great red spot, a cyclonic weather system that circles the mountain year-round in storm clouds.

Olympus mons is a volcano not mountain.

couldn't you say all volcanos are mountains but not all mountains are volcanos?

You're a moron.

See Also, it WAS a volcano. Mars doesn't have volcanic activity anymore.

pretty sure we call them non-active VOLCANOS.
they don't lose the title once they stop expelling magma.

And volcanos can (and typically are) mountains.

The definitions are not mutually exclusive.

that was my original point yes

>volcano not mountain
>It's both
See

It has geysers!

There are three types of volcano.
Active, which could erupt at any time.
Dormant, which hasn't erupted for a while but could.
Extinct, which isn't going to.

Do you read books, jackass? At all?

if i'm correct, olympus mons is so large that it's cracking the crust on mars' surface. it'll eventually begin to sink into the center of the planet because of how much of a strain it is on the crust

it's still a mountain you doughnut

Holy shit, this picture. Took me a minute.

It's like a big inverted nipple

As far as I know (not terribly far, mind you), you're not going to get a natural formation like that on a planet with plate tectonics, and if the planet has oceans, it probably has plate tectonics. You're not likely to get many earthquakes, except at large volcanic events, of which you'll have a good share.

I should add: But this is for a tabletop game setting. Make whatever you want. A gigantor mountain protruding past the atmosphere is dope as fuck.

The Internet Hate Machine does it again, the maniacs!

I think you may be mistaking the Tharsis region for Olympus Mons, but it may be that both are causing that effect.
Interestingly, the Tharsis bulge has such high mass in one area of the planet it likely caused the entirety of Mars to change. All that mass used to be further north than it is now and migrated south to the equator, and in the process it dragged the ENTIRE crust and mantle along with it.

If we take that and apply it to this giant mountain, the same thing would occur so it would almost certainly be placed on the equator, or would be in the process of doing so (and causing all sorts of seismic and climate problems on the way).

I don't get it. What is it?

The three main characters in Disney's Aladdin adaptation are Aladdin, the princess whose name escapes me, and Aladdin's pet monkey

Jasmine.

Jasper is her name.

...

The MASS of this thing you are speaking of would have destablizing effects on the rotation and geological harmony of the planet.

While it would have some effect on the weather patterns the greater effect on a 50 mile high mountain is the fact all that rock is sitting there applying pressure on the tectonic plate.

> how does it not sink into the ground
> the planet with the huge mountain on it may not have tectonics or lava in it but still this is going to cause some wobbling

Gravity would probably immediately begin ripping it downward, causing phenomenal amounts of geological activity as the tectonic plate it was placed on is weighted down towards the mantle. Tremendous earthquakes rock the area, plate activity spikes, and the most of the mass that comprises it will be buried underground over time. Displacing the mantle beneath and very possibly shattering the tectonic plate from immense pressures, a new orogenic range may form around its former base.
This occurs over the course of a few hundred thousand to several million years.

Mars must die. Don't mess with Texas.

I only have a rudimentary idea about geology, but going by and a quick google tells me that it wouldn't sink or have any effects at all, AS LONG AS it's already stable by having a bigger 'base' underground.

Mountains (and other geologic features) 'float' on the mantle, like how icebergs do on the sea.
A fuckheug mountain just needs an even more fuckhueg root to 'float' on to be stable.

>hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu/PDS/EXTRAS/RDR/PSP/ORB_001700_001799/PSP_001760_2160/PSP_001760_2160_RED.browse.jpg
What did they mean by this?

Ignoring the geological problems for now (because I'd imagine they're fairly difficult and complicated to address) can the rotational disturbance a 50 mile high mountain would cause on Earth (or anywhere else) be calculated without too much trouble? That seems to me like the sort of thing that might have a good effort to payoff ratio for setting purposes. The same goes for figuring out what the horizon would look like, assuming I'm simply being dumb/lazy when it comes to the trigonometry.

> most of the mass that comprises it will be buried underground over time

Isn't most of the mass that comprises any mountain already buried underground by default? After all, the whole definition of a mountain is essentially "a place where the ground is much higher than elsewhere" so only the outer surface of the mountain is aboveground.

Space Engine.

Yeah, Everest is easy, just gotta follow the trail of frozen corpses.

Not good at the scientific part, but what I would like to see

>states/civilizations developing on the huge area on the slopes of the mountain
Entire countries on a +30 degree sloped surface.
>the mountain would have several races
Trade/warfare between the "low" and "high" races.
>huge cave sections in the side of the mountain with their own biomes/races
>the highest areas would be shrouded in mystery and inhabited by creatures completely alien to the ones living on the base

Basically the mountain would be a sort of mini-continent, but with most of the inhabited areas being on a slope and most movement being up-down.