How are Martian mountains measured?
On maps, a mountain’s height is always shown solely as its peak’s elevation above sea level. This seems like a bit of a cop-out to me: is the mountain itself really that tall? Or is it just standing on the shoulders of a very tall plateau, so to speak? Then again, determining the base from which to measure any mountain seems like quite the slippery slope once you get down to it, so I do understand and sympathize with the sea level approach adopted by us Earthlings. But what about pinnacle-peppered planets and oceanless asteroids — (how) do we measure their mountains?
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