TIL Jupiter's moon Io has lava lakes bigger than the state of Maryland

I was scrolling through the NASA astronomy picture of the day archive last Tuesday, just killing time before my shift, and I stopped on a shot of Io. The caption mentioned Loki Patera, a lava lake that's something like 124 miles across. I had no idea a single volcanic feature could be that massive. It made me rethink how small our own volcanoes really are, you know? Has anyone else been surprised by a planetary detail in a photo that just rewired their brain about scale?

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lindaw1223d agoMost Upvoted

The "rewired my brain" part hits hard because I had the same moment with Mars' Olympus Mons, I kept staring at the elevation map like it was a glitch. My advice is to grab a ruler and mark that scale on your own state map, it makes the size feel real instead of just a number. Once you do that, you start seeing every volcano photo way differently, I promise.