Wonders of the Solar System:Dead or alive

Professor Brian Cox visits some of the most dramatic locations on Earth to explain how the laws of nature create astonishing natural wonders across the Solar System.The worlds that surround our planet are made of rock, but there the similarity ends. Some have a beating geological heart, others are frozen in time. Brian travels to the tallest mountain on Earth, the volcano Mauna Kea on Hawaii, to show how a planet’s size can make the difference between life and death. Even on the summit of this volcano, Brian stands in the shade of the tallest mountain in the Solar System, an extinct volcano on Mars called Olympus Mons, which rises up 27kms.Yet the most volcanic wonder isn’t on a planet at all. It’s on a tiny moon of Jupiter. The discoveries made on Io have been astonishing. This fragment of rock should be cold and dead, yet, with the volcanic landscape of Eastern Ethiopia as a backdrop, Brian reveals why Io is home to lakes of molten lava and giant volcanic plumes that erupt

Pariscience 2011
: Sunday 09th October 2011 from 16h00 to 17h30