• Skua
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    41 year ago

    A 1m square tower that size would only be 4,169 m ^3 . Mauna Loa is mostly basalt, which weighs about 2.9 Mg per m ^3 . This tower would therefore weigh about 12,000 tonnes. You’d need almost 6 billion of those towers to get to the 70 trillion Mg figure.

    Mauna Loa’s actual mass is probably about three times that number because of the density of the rocks in it, but in terms of orders-of-magnitude estimation it was about right.