Science Question:
What is the difference in widths of lava tubes from Olympus Mons, Elysium Mons and Albor tholus? What can this tell us about the relationship between the size of the volcano and the size of the lava tube?

Main Results:
1) A trend that we observed in our data was that as the volcanoes got larger their lava tubes seemed to do the same. This would suggest to us that the larger the volcano is the larger the lava tubes will be. However, we feel that there may be other aspects that come into play which we were not focusing on. We feel that we would need to look at more images to support this relationship conclusively.


2) On the opposite side of the spectrum our data revealed that the medium sized volcano (Elysium Mons) had the narrowest lava tube. This goes against the trends we noticed with the largest lava tubes (stated above) and further supported our ideas that other factors came into play when focusing on the relationship between the volcanoes and their lava tubes. Again, we decided that in order to clearly see if there was a relationship we would need to look at more images.

3) Due to some of the inconsistencies of our data, as mentioned above, we concluded that the size of the volcano may not be the determining factor in the sizes of its lava tubes. We feel that there may be other factors at play such as the rate the lava was flowing, the temperature of the lava and the composition of the material it flowed through and the amount of lava coming from the volcano.

Final Report

Extra Comments:
1) “One thing I found interesting is that Mars had water on its surface which might lead to having life on Mars.” - Andy

2) “Doing the Mars Project made me think back to our own Earth. It makes me interested in what was, what is, and what will be right here on Earth’s surface.” - Pa

3) “I think there is a basic truth about science that applies to the Mars project. We know plenty but we always want to know more.” - Connor