Talk:Skadi Mons

Not a mountain

The IAU/USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature has announced that Skadi Mons is not a mountain on Venus. The name "Skadi Mons" is now permanently disallowed (in other words, banned). I am not sure how we should handle this article now that it is not a real geological feature. Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 01:28, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

@Nrco0e: I'm not really sure what to do with this either. In my opinion, the banning isn't the issue. IAU can ban whatever they like, Wikipedia ought not to care, but the fact that there literally is no mountain there (and the feature as described doesn't exist) is a problem we can't just ignore. Topographic data analysis has shown there is no mons feature at this location -- It would be great if we could point directly to the study that does this data analysis. Has it been published? What's the context here?

Maybe ask on WP:ASTRO, too. I don't think the Skadi Mons article is watched by a lot of people. Renerpho (talk) 07:42, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

I can't find any recently published (<2 years ago) study related to the topography of Maxwell Montes and Skadi Mons. Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 07:47, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

@Nrco0e: Could this be related to https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2024JE008778 ? Renerpho (talk) 17:27, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

I don't think so. The paper doesn't address Skadi Mons, nor does it talk about the Maxwell Montes much Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 02:51, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

@Nrco0e: True, but it finds that there are systematic problems with our topographic model of Venus -- finding that almost 3% of the entire surface has unreliable elevation data. If I should speculate (and what's a Wikipedia talk page good for if not idle speculation?), maybe the removal of the mountain is part of a follow up to Peres et al. (2025). I have sent him an email; I'll report back when I get a reply. Renerpho (talk) 10:57, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

@Nrco0e: I got a reply from Gerard Gallardo i Peres, main author of the May 2025 paper. He gives some context about the process itself. Quoted with his permission:

This is an interesting development - I was not aware of the USGS Gazetteer update.
From my part, I can say that to begin with, the official location of Skadi Mons (64ºN, 4ºE) does not appear to be on a relative high area within Maxwell Montes if considering Magellan GTDR. So "the highest point on Venus" is not at this location.
My recent study points out locations with high probability of underestimation of height - not the opposite. Around the area of Maxwell Montes and in particular where Skadi Mons is supposed to be located, there are values that could actually be higher than they are in the current product - so that alone goes against the name being dropped. Sometimes, the opposite could be happening (very high values that are actually spurious and much lower) due to range ambiguities being picked up - but I do not think that is the case around the accepted location of Skadi Mons.
Moreover, the presence of an anomaly per se is not enough to do a proper feature classification - to properly assess whether there has been an erroneous height estimation at a location, one would need to do a cross-analysis of the different altimeter echoes that contribute to this precise location and resolve which common power peak is the one that carries its physical information. From my part, I am not aware such analysis has been done at Skadi Mons.

So, their paper has nothing to do with it. Something else is behind the dropping of the name. But also, the claim that Skadi Mons is the highest point on Venus seems to have been questionable to begin with. Maybe we should look closer at the reliable sources for that part (which sadly don't include emails, even when they come from experts on the subject). Renerpho (talk) 19:06, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

@Renerpho: Interesting. I think you should directly contact the WGPSN (or at least someone in it) about Skadi Mons, if that's possible. Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 21:03, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. I'll see what I can do, starting from the list of members. Renerpho (talk) 16:41, 2 January 2026 (UTC) --- I have contacted Ellen Stofan. I'll report back again when I learn anything interesting. Renerpho (talk) 17:29, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

The IAU/USGS Gazetteer announcement is just another source adding to the notability of the topic. The IAU announcement is very reliable secondary source and it should be the primary point of view now. (I agree with Renerpho that the "ban" is not relevant here.) Johnjbarton (talk) 18:10, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

Damn. They disproved its existence and then disallowed the name. That's sad,considering that I like the Norse goddess Skadi. IapetusCallistus (talk) 23:52, 4 January 2026 (UTC)

Question: is it possible that SM could have been a tall mountain when first discovered, and then changed due to the dynamic geological conditions on Venus? P.I. Ellsworth , ed. – welcome! – 08:29, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

No, I don't think that's conceivable. If that was the case, it would be the most spectacular geological discovery on Venus in decades. I see no evidence that it changed in any way since we've been studying Venus (or at any point in the past several million years). The IAU isn't claiming that Skadi Mons has ceased to exist. Renerpho (talk) 17:23, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

• Professor Donovan Leitch may have said it best. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:26, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Donovan had a good handle on lotsa things! P.I. Ellsworth , ed. – welcome! – 06:01, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

I'm just not sure if that passes as a RS ;) Renerpho (talk) 10:53, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

New paper disproving Skadi Mons

At last, there's a paper (or at least a preprint) explaining why Skadi Mons is not a mountain: https://essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10.22541/essoar.15004230/v1 Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 20:56, 21 July 2026 (UTC)