The tallest cliff in the solar system is so extreme that even imagining standing on its edge is enough to make your stomach drop. On a tiny, battered moon circling Uranus, a single fault scarp called Verona Rupes plunges for tens of kilometers, dwarfing anything carved by plate tectonics on Earth. I want to unpack what that actually looks like, how it compares with our own planet’s most dramatic drops, and why this alien precipice has become a quiet obsession for scientists and space fans alike.
Meet Verona Rupes, the cliff that rewrites “sheer drop”
Verona Rupes is a towering cliff on Miranda, one of the small moons orbiting Uranus, and it is widely cited as the tallest known cliff in the Solar System. Estimates drawn from spacecraft imaging and later analysis suggest the scarp could be around 20 km high, or roughly 12 mi, which would make Verona Rupes almost unimaginably tall by terrestrial standards. That figure is not just a curiosity, it is the basis for its status in record books and popular science explainers that treat this one feature as the benchmark for vertical relief beyond Earth.
The cliff sits on Miranda, a world that is itself only a fraction of the size of our planet. The moon’s diameter is given as “at just 470 km (290 m) in diameter,” which underscores how a body barely a few hundred kilometers across can host a scarp that drops for a significant fraction of its own radius. That scale is part of what makes Verona Rupes so unsettling: a single fault line on a moon only 470 km wide, described in more detail on Miranda, drops so far that a human fall would last minutes rather than seconds. Even before getting into the physics, the raw geometry is enough to make the palms sweat.
How a tiny moon ended up with a mega-cliff
Miranda’s surface is a patchwork of canyons, ridges, and jumbled terrain that hints at a violent past, and Verona Rupes is one of the clearest expressions of that history. The feature was first seen when the Voyager 2 space probe flew past Uranus and its moons, capturing the first close images of this fractured world. Those pictures revealed a cliff that seemed to slice across the landscape, and later work led the International Astronomical Union, or IAU, to adopt the name Verona Rupes for the scarp.
Miranda’s low gravity and icy composition likely helped preserve such a steep face without it collapsing into a more gradual slope. The moon is one of the smallest closely observed objects in the Solar System, a status highlighted again in the Surface description that compares its size to a U.S. state. On a world this small, internal heating, tidal flexing from Uranus, and ancient impacts could all have contributed to tearing the crust apart, leaving behind a cliff that looks almost surgically cut. The result is a landscape where a single fault scarp dominates the horizon in a way that is hard to match on larger, more geologically relaxed bodies.
Earth’s biggest drop looks modest next to Miranda
To grasp how extreme Verona Rupes is, it helps to start with the most dramatic cliff face on our own planet. On Earth, the standout is Mount Thor in Nunavut, Canada, which is often cited as having the tallest vertical drop on the planet. The granite wall of Mount Thor in Nunavut, Canada, drops for more than a kilometer, making it the tallest cliff face on Earth and a magnet for big-wall climbers and base jumpers. Even that, though, is a mere scratch compared with the scale of Miranda’s scarp.
Educational material on Jumping the Tallest in the Solar System drives home the comparison by noting that the tallest cliff known beyond Earth is far higher than Mount Thor and even taller than Mount Everest. When I line those numbers up, the contrast is stark: a roughly 20 km drop on Miranda versus a little over 1 km of vertical on Earth’s most famous wall. It is the difference between a terrifying but survivable base jump and a fall so long that you would have time to think about every mistake that led you to the edge.
What falling from Verona Rupes would actually feel like
The nightmare scenario that captures people’s imagination is simple: what if you stepped off the edge? On Miranda, gravity is far weaker than on Earth, so a fall from Verona Rupes would be slower, but it would last much longer. One widely shared explanation of The Tallest Cliff suggests that a person could fall for more than ten minutes before reaching the bottom, eventually hitting the ground at highway speeds. A separate discussion of Miranda and its gravity puts the final impact at about 200 km/h, fast enough that no spacesuit would save you.
That combination of slow-motion descent and lethal final speed is what makes the thought experiment so unsettling. A social media post that frames Verona Rupes on Uranus’s moon Miranda as the tallest cliff in the solar system leans into that horror, inviting readers to imagine standing at the brink and watching the horizon curve away beneath them. In that scenario, the terror is not just the height, it is the awareness that you are falling across a significant slice of an entire moon.
From Voyager snapshots to record books and Reddit threads
Since the first images arrived from NASA’s Voyager 2 encounter with Uranus and its moons, Verona Rupes has steadily migrated from obscure geological feature to pop culture reference. The record keepers who track the Highest cliffs in the Solar System now point to this scarp as the benchmark, noting that NASA’s Voyager 2 probe encountered Uranus and its collection of moons in 1986 and helped establish the basic measurements. That official recognition feeds back into how educators and communicators talk about the feature, reinforcing its status as the go-to example when explaining extreme topography beyond Earth.
At the same time, Verona Rupes has become a minor celebrity in online communities. A virtual tour shared in an astronomy forum describes a virtual visit to the tallest cliffs in the solar system, while another thread about More on Uranus highlights how the biggest cliff in the solar system is orbiting that distant planet. Even the main reference entry for Verona Rupes on Wikipedia, framed by a banner that reads Donate Now If is useful to you, has become a jumping-off point for countless social posts and explainers. The cliff has effectively gone from a grainy feature in a Voyager frame to a shared mental image of what “too high” really means.
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