Bluish-white water ice clouds hang above the Tharsis volcanoes on Mars. (Stocktrek Images/Getty Images)

A massive volcanic eruption on Mars caused the entire face of the planet to tilt by 25 degrees, a new study finds.

Around 3.5 to 3 billion years ago, the Tharsis volcanic dome — which happens to be the largest in the entire solar system measuring nearly half the size of France — erupted, altering the planet's face, according to a new study in the weekly science journal Nature.

The explosion registered a mass of a billion billion metric tons of matter, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons, unsettling the mantle and crust of the planet enough to shift its outer crust drastically, according to Popular Mechanics.

The Tharsis region (shown in shades of red and brown) dominates the western hemisphere of Mars.

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University -JMARS)

The Tharsis volcanic dome, which first began to form over 3.7 billion years ago around a latitude of 20 degrees north, now sits near the planet's equator, says a press release from the French National Center for Scientific Research.

In simple terms, Mars’ North and South poles are no longer where they should be.

“If a similar shift happened on Earth, Paris would be in the Polar Circle,” explained lead researcher Sylvain Bouley, a geomorphologist at the University of Paris-Sud. “We’d see Northern Lights in France, and wine grapes would be grown in Sudan.”

However, the eruption has researchers asking whether the event had a say in the remaining unanswered questions pertaining to the red planet.

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“Scientists couldn’t figure out why the [dried up] rivers were where they are,” explained Bouley. “But if you take into account the shift in the surface, they all line up on the same tropical band.”

The same goes for the massive underground supply of frozen water ice that theoretically should have been found closer to the planet’s poles. After factoring in the crust's shift, we now know they were at one point.

“But there are still a lot of unanswered questions,” said Bouley. “Did the tilt cause the magnetic fields to shut down? Did it contribute to the disappearance of Mars’s atmosphere, or cause the rivers to stop flowing? These are things we don’t know yet.”

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As part of its investigation of 'Victoria Crater,' Opportunity examined a promontory called 'Cape Verde' from the vantage point of 'Cape St. Mary,' the next promontory clockwise around the crater's deeply scalloped rim. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell)