A Martian volcano taller than Everest has been hiding in plain sight

Pack it up Satoshi Nakamoto, there’s a new hide-and-seek champion of the universe.

A team of scientists recently announced the discovery of a volcano taller than Mount Everest on the surface of Mars, which has been “hid[ing] in plain sight” for the past 50+ years.

What’s behind the large oversight? According to the researchers, spacecraft orbiting Mars have been unknowingly capturing images of Noctis Mons, or “night mountain,” ever since they first arrived at the red planet in 1971.

• However, Noctis Mons is so deeply eroded that it slipped under the radar over the years – until the new study pieced together images from several Mars orbiters to establish the volcano’s existence.

And, if you’re still wondering how a 29,600-foot-tall volcano went unnoticed for decades, it may help to know the scale of landmarks on Mars – Noctis Mons is the seventh-tallest known peak on the red planet, and pales in comparison to other Martian peaks like Olympus Mons (an Arizona-sized volcano that’s ~3x taller).

👀 Looking ahead… Noctis Mons appears to have glaciers near its surface, potentially making the volcano an attractive site for future human exploration. NASA plans to land the first humans on Mars as early as the 2030s.