Mt Everest is just under 5.5miles high. Olympus Mons on Mars is 16 miles high. Why aren’t there much larger mountains on Earth? What’s the highest a mountain can go on Earth?
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This might be a bit late to the party, but at Uni we were told about the glacial buzzsaw theory, which is probably my favourite name of any theory!
Basically as mountains get higher the top gets colder. Beyond the freeze thaw cycle a permanent glacier just grind the tops down. So mountains could be higher but in geological time they get eroded faster the higher and colder they go.
This theory however does have its critics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_buzzsaw
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