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Mauna Kea
Hawaii's sacred shield volcano, the tallest mountain measured from base
Mauna Kea reaches 4,207 metres above the Pacific, but its true scale is hidden: measured from its base on the seafloor, it stands over 10,000 metres tall, making it the highest mountain on Earth from bottom to top. A dormant shield volcano on the island of Hawaii, its summit is one of the few places in the tropics to see snow, and its clear, dry air has made it one of the world's premier sites for astronomy - a status that collides with its deep sacredness to Native Hawaiians.
Mauna Kea is a shield volcano, built from countless fluid lava flows into a broad, gently sloping dome rather than a steep cone, and it last erupted some 4,500 years ago. Rising from the ocean floor, its combined submarine and subaerial height exceeds Everest's elevation above sea level. The summit's thin, stable, cloud-free air above much of the Pacific's weather offers astronomers extraordinary seeing, and its cinder cones and lava landscapes hold relics of past glaciation - including evidence of a small ice cap during the last ice age.
To Native Hawaiians, Mauna Kea is the realm of deities and an ancestor, among the most sacred places in the islands, and the construction of large observatories near its summit has provoked sustained protest and legal battle, most prominently over the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope. A cluster of major telescopes already crowns the peak, drawing astronomers worldwide. The mountain sits at the heart of a long reckoning over science, land, and Indigenous rights in Hawaii.